The European Commission has published an Action Plan to strengthen the fight against terrorist financing. There are two main strands to this plan:
- enhanced detection of terrorists and tracing of their financial movements; and
- disrupting the sources of revenue of terrorist organisations, by targeting their capacity to raise funds.
This Action Plan envisages that the implementation date of the Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive will be brought forward to Q4 2016 (from mid-2017).
FATF held a meeting in Paris on 17-19 February 2016. The main issues dealt with included:
- Work on terrorist financing, which remains the top priority for the FATF, including:
- Approval of a Consolidated FATF Strategy on Combating Terrorist Financing.
- Focus on enhancing effective exchange of information.
- Considering whether changes are necessary to the FATF Standards for combatting terrorist financing.
- Assessing and improving implementation of counter terrorist financing measures.
- A statement on Brazil’s continued failure to address the serious deficiencies identified in its mutual evaluation reports.
- Two public documents identifying jurisdictions that may pose a risk to the international financial system.
- Revising the FATF/FATF-Style Regional Body High-Level Principles and Objectives.
- Developments on de-risking.