Morocco’s ability to effectively fight money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation, an action that requires a coherent approach at the global level, was deemed insufficient and therefore put on hold (gray list) by the Intergovernmental Financial Action Group (FATF)
In any case, this is what the final declaration of the last plenary meeting held from October 19 to 21 and chaired by Dr. Marcus Pleyer (Germany) president for two years (2020-2022) says. It would seem that despite the efforts to improve its legislation and its legal arsenal in the matter desired, moreover, by the FATF, which brings together some forty of the main financial centers of the planet, has kept the Kingdom in this gray list of “can do better He had integrated last February for recommendations that he would not have met then.
The Kingdom in all likelihood would not have increased the suspicious declarations of the beneficial owners including legal persons, it would have failed in addition as regards the well-founded surveillance and would not have applied the corrective measures through appropriate and effective sanctions. Our country is also criticized for the strange legal arrangements, the lack of oversight and oversight of the compliance of financial institutions and non-financial businesses and professions.
In short, what the FATF criticizes us is that we do not fight enough money laundering, the financing of terrorism. So he decided to put the Kingdom “under surveillance”, that is to say to classify it on this famous “gray list” of insufficiently cooperative countries in this area, just like Turkey, for example.
However, it does not seem that our country is dealing with financial flows deriving from criminal activities, trafficking in drugs, arms and human beings, racketeering, corruption, tax evasion, which would be reinvested in legal activities.
This gray list of the FATF includes so far twenty-two countries, including two Europeans (Malta and Albania), in addition to Morocco, Syria, Yemen and various well-known banking havens.
The FATF also distributes a so-called black list, grouping together the dunces of the class like Iran and North Korea. The OECD and the EU also maintain such lists. The EU had moreover freed us from its gray list of tax havens for good behavior.
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