The Financial Action Task Force has granted Iran until February to complete necessary reforms in the area of anti-money laundering and combating financing of terrorism. In a statement issued following the conclusion of the group’s plenary meeting in Paris, the FATF announced that it had “decided at its meeting this week to continue the suspension of counter-measures.”
The move will be seen as a victory by reform-minded bankers and politicians in Iran, who have battled fierce domestic opposition and foreign skepticism to push through critical legislation required by the FATF action plan.
The United States, which recently took over the presidency of the FATF, had been pushing aggressively for Iran to be returned to the so-called “blacklist.” Senior Republican lawmakers had recently written to President Trump to ask him to ensure Iran would not be able to earn a clean bill of health from the FATF.
But European resistance, motivated in part by a desire to avoid politicizing the evaluations of the global body, helped ensure a fairer assessment of Iran’s technical progress on its action plan.