The much-awaited Financial Action Task Force (FATF) mutual evaluation of India’s anti-money laundering regime and legal measures framed to check financial crimes, scheduled for this year, has been postponed till early next year in view of the coronavirus pandemic, officials said.
They said the on-site review to be conducted by experts of the global body was scheduled to begin in Sep-Oct but the FATF secretariat in Paris has conveyed to India that the review is being tentatively pushed to Jan-Feb next year. The FATF is a global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog that sets international standards to prevent illegal activities in the economic and financial channels of a country and its inter-connected linkages across the world.
It conducts “peer reviews of each member on an ongoing basis to assess levels of implementation of the FATF recommendations and provides an in-depth description and analysis of each country’s system for preventing criminal abuse of the financial system.”
The review of India’s anti-money laundering and terrorist financing regime was scheduled for this year as part of a regular review cycle after 10 years. The last such review was done in June 2010, a senior officer in an anti-money laundering agency said. The FATF, post this review, had said in 2013 that “India had made significant progress in addressing deficiencies identified in its mutual evaluation report and decided that the country should be removed from the regular follow-up process.” India has set up a joint working group comprising 22 central investigation, intelligence gathering and regulatory agencies to make presentations and brief the FATF experts, drawn from various countries, this time. Some of the prominent agencies in this grouping supervised by the Department of Revenue under the finance ministry include the CBI, ED, Income Tax Department, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Financial Intelligence Unit , Customs, market regulator SEBI, banking regulator RBI and insurance regulator IRDAI.