Outreach and Awareness Sessions with Private Sector Entities

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), with the support of United Kingdom, carried out outreach and awareness activities to the SECP regulated non-banking financial institutions (NBFIs) and informal financial sectors from the AML/CFT regime such as Designated Non-Financial Businesses and Professionals (DNFBPs) in line with Pakistan’s recent legislative changes enacted in the AML Act 2010. These sessions were held in collaboration with counterparts including NACTA as part of the sensitization campaign of the programme aimed at enhancing compliance and reporting capacities of private sector entities in Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter Financing of Terrorism (CFT) in Pakistan.The sessions were held at all provincial capitals 07-08 December, 2020 at Karachi, 10-11 December 2020 at Quetta, 16-17 December 2020 at Peshawar and 22-23 December 2020 at Lahore.

The capacity building and outreach sessions; tailored to cover six essential areas of mandatory compliance requirements from private sector entities. Each of these areas serves to directly contribute towards compliance to the FATF recommendations especially considering results of the Mutual Evaluation Report of Pakistan with respect to the Technical Compliance and Immediate Outcomes as per FATF Methodology. The capacity building programme significantly contributed towards improving the understanding of compliance to FATF’s Immediate Outcomes (IO) for risk assessment (IO-1), for financial institution and DNFBPs (IO-3 and 4), for beneficial ownership compliance (IO-5) and for compliance with Targeted Financial Sanctions (TFS) (IO-10).

Mr. Nadeem Akhtar Sherazi, Director-CFT from NACTA delivered the sessions related to recent amendments in ATA, 1997 and their sectoral relevance, TF risk assessments and its linkages with sectoral channels during the programs at Karachi, Peshawar and Lahore while Israr Ahmed Khan, Director-LEAs delivered similar NACTA related sessions at Quetta. Each session was followed by questions & answer (Q&A) segment in which queries of participants were responded. The subject sessions remained very useful and will go a long way to enhance understanding and build AML/CFT capacity of participating institutions.