Daily Alert Archives

Iran Defying Financial Action Task Force

(The Hill) Toby Dershowitz, Saeed Ghasseminejad, and Serena Frechter - On June 16, the 36-nation Financial Action Task Force (FATF) convened in Orlando and will decide whether Iran has met the body's requirements. While Iran has been encouraged to reverse course, Tehran continues to defy FATF. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has declared that Iran had "utterly failed to meet its commitments under the Financial Action Task Force action plan that it had agreed to." Consequently, FATF should maintain Iran on its blacklist of high-risk jurisdictions and reimpose increased due diligence protocols. In 2016, Iran agreed to complete a 10-item plan to meet FATF standards by January 2018. More than a year after the deadline, Iran has failed to complete seven of the 10 items. Hossein Mozaffar, a member of the Expediency Council, said he opposes complying with the action plan. "The kind of transparency that FATF seeks...is to find out our ways for bypassing sanctions," he said. There should be consequences for Iran's continuous attempts to circumvent FATF's standards. Toby Dershowitz is senior vice president of government relations and strategy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Saeed Ghasseminejad is a senior advisor on Iran and Serena Frechter is a government relations analyst.
2019-06-18 00:00:00
Full Article