Paris [France], October 25 (ANI): The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) kept Nepal and 17 other countries on its 'greylist' and reviewed their progress in addressing strategic deficiencies in combating money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing.

These countries were placed on the list due to strategic deficiencies in their financial systems and have 24 months to implement necessary legal, policy, and structural reforms.

The global watchdog against terror financing reviewed the progress made by Nepal, Algeria, Angola, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Lao PDR, Monaco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Vietnam.

The country must address these deficiencies, which include failures to fully implement necessary legal, policy, and structural reforms, within two years to avoid potential international obstacles and sanctions. The grey listing negatively impacts Nepal's economy, financial sector, and international relations.

Meanwhile, Bolivia, Haiti, Lebanon, the Virgin Islands (UK) and Yemen chose to defer reporting on their efforts, the FATF said in an official statement on Friday.

Since February 2025, Nepal has made a high-level political commitment to work with the FATF and APG to strengthen the effectiveness of its Anti-Money Laundering / Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) regime. Nepal has taken some steps towards improving its regime.

The Task Force said that the country should improve its understanding of key Money Laundering/Terror Financing (ML/TF) risks, improve risk-based supervision of commercial banks higher-risk cooperatives, casinos, DPMS, and the real estate sector; demonstrate identification and sanctioning of materially significant illegal MVTS/hundi providers, without hindering inclusion; increasing capacity, coordination of competent authorities; demonstrate an increase in ML investigations and prosecutions; show measures to identify, trace, restrain, seize, and, where applicable, confiscate proceeds and instrumentalities of crime; and address technical compliance deficiencies in its targeted financial sanctions regime.

In February 2025, the Lao PDR made a high-level political commitment to work with the FATF and APG to strengthen the effectiveness of its AML/CFT regime. Since then, the country has addressed technical compliance deficiencies in relation to the TF offence.

Meanwhile, for the Virgin Islands (UK), which deferred to report on its progress, it committed in June 2025 to work with the FATF and CFATF to strengthen the effectiveness of its AML/CFT regime. Since the adoption of the Mutual Evaluation Report (MER) in November 2023, the Virgin Islands (UK) has made significant progress on its MER's recommended actions, including increasing requests for international cooperation.

The FATF greylist includes countries that have been placed under increased monitoring, and the country has committed to resolving the identified strategic deficiencies within agreed timeframes.

'The FATF calls on these jurisdictions to complete their action plans expeditiously and within the agreed timeframes. The FATF welcomes their commitment and will closely monitor their progress. The FATF does not call for the application of enhanced due diligence measures to be applied to these jurisdictions,' the official statement mentioned.

The FATF identifies additional jurisdictions, on an ongoing basis, that have strategic deficiencies in their regimes to counter money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing. A number of jurisdictions have not yet been reviewed by the FATF or their FSRBs, but will be in due course.

Jurisdictions under increased monitoring are actively working with the FATF to address strategic deficiencies in their regimes to counter money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing, the task force said. (ANI)