International standards
As indicated in last week’s column, the original publication of the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) Forty Recommen-dations took place in 1990. This was revised in 1996 and again seven years later in 2003. In between these two years, and following on the terrorist attacks in the United States on 9/11/2001, Eight Special Recommendations were added to the forty, and shortly thereafter the eight were expanded to the nine. Subsequent to the third round of Mutual Evaluations among Member States, the FATF in collaboration with what it has designated as FATF-style Regional Bodies (FSRBs) along with its Observer Organisations thoroughly revised and updated these recommendations and published them in 2012. This is, therefore, the updated definitive global structure for countering money laundering, the financing of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
This FATF 2012 document details the definitive international standards after taking into account those new and emerging threats it could identify in order to strengthen the recommendations in anticipation of these. In the document, FATF has focused very heavily on risk along with terrorist financing, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
The FATF 2012 International Standards are organized into seven major groupings. These are: Policies and Coordination; Money Laundering and Confiscation; Terrorist Financing and Financing of