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.