In a setback for Islamabad, Pakistan has remained on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list, that country’s media reported on Friday. The FATF plenary in Paris gave the verdict despite Islamabad’s claims that it has made ‘significant’ headway towards fulfilling the prerequisites defined by the terror funding watchdog.

“Pakistan remains under increased monitoring,” FATF President Dr Marcus Pleyer said while addressing a virtual press conference from Paris, Dawn reported. While acknowledging that Islamabad had made ‘significant progress’ in its action against terror funding, he added that there were ‘serious deficiencies’ in mechanisms to stop terror funding.

“Pakistan remains under increasing monitoring. It has largely addressed 26 out of 27 items on the action plan… Pakistan is still failing to effectively implement the global FATF standards across a number of areas which means the risk of money laundering remain high which in turn can fuel corruption and organised crime,” Pleyer said.

The FATF verdict is likely to be received as an unpleasant surprise by Islamabad, given that the diplomatic machinery of the country was convinced that it has done enough to be excluded from the grey list. Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi had recently said that Pakistan had completed work on 26 of the 27 points given by the organisation.

As reported by Times Now, Pakistan was put on the FATF grey list in June 2018. In the previous observation in February, the FATF had observed that Pakistan should improve its investigations and prosecutions against entities financing terrorists operating out of its soil