Pakistan's junior Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar will attend the plenary session of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in Paris during which the global anti-money laundering watchdog would discuss Islamabad's efforts to exit its grey list.
The first FATF Plenary under the two-year Singapore Presidency of T.Raja Kumar will take place on October 20, 21, according to the Paris-based watchdog.
Khar, the State Minister for Foreign Affairs, has reached Paris to attend the FATF meeting which would decide whether to remove Pakistan from its grey list, the Daily Times newspaper reported.
On Monday, Khar led a Pakistani team in a meeting with Jean-Louis Bourlanges, the head of the foreign affairs committee of the French National Assembly, the paper reported.
The FATF's Working Group and Plenary sessions in Paris will be attended by representatives from 206 Global Network members and observer organisations including, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, the World Bank, Interpol, and the Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units.
The plenary's decisions would be made public at the end of the two days of discussion.
Pakistan was included in the grey list in June 2018 for deficiencies and given a plan of action to plug various legal, financial and regulatory to fight money laundering and combat terror financing.
Islamabad made high-level political commitments to address these deficiencies under a 27-point action plan. But later the number of action points was enhanced to 34.
With Pakistan's continuation on the grey list, it had increasingly become difficult for Islamabad to get financial aid from the IMF, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the European Union, thus further enhancing problems for the cash-strapped country.
A 15-member joint delegation of the FATF and its Sydney-based regional affiliate - Asia Pacific Group - paid an onsite visit to Pakistan from August 29 to September 2 to verify the country's compliance with the 34-point action plan committed with the FATF.
The authorities here had kept the countrywide visit of the delegation low profile and later termed it a smooth and successful visit.
According to Pakistan's Foreign Office, the focus of the visit was to validate on the ground Pakistan's high-level commitment and sustainability of reforms in the Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terror (AML/CFT) regime and (it) looked forward to logical conclusion to the evaluation process.
The report of the FATF onsite team will be discussed in FATF's International Cooperation Review Group and plenary meetings.
Pakistan believes that as a result of strenuous and consistent efforts over the past four years, it has not only achieved a high degree of technical compliance with the FATF's standards but also ensured a high level of effectiveness through the implementation of two comprehensive FATF action plans.
In June, FATF had found Pakistan compliant or largely compliant on all the 34 points and had decided to field an onsite mission to verify it on the ground before formally announcing the country's exit from the grey list that finally took place in August and September.
According to the Dawn newspaper report, the government had given a commitment to the IMF to review by end-June 2022 the implementation of AML/CFT controls by financial institutions with respect to the tax amnesty programme for the construction sector and promised to meet the timelines for the implementation of APG's 2021 Action Plan.
Pakistan has so far avoided being on the black list of the FATF with the help of close allies like China, Turkey and Malaysia.
The FATF is an inter-governmental body established in 1989 to combat money laundering, terrorist financing and other related threats to the integrity of the international financial system.