Ken Ofori Atta – FInance Minister
THE EUROPEAN Union is set to remove Ghana from the dirty money list.
This follows EU member states rejection of the proposal by the EU Executive Commission to blacklist Ghana and other 22 countries.
Ghana had already expressed regrets about its inclusion on the dirty money list, describing the decision as “regrettable.”
The Finance Ministry had maintained that the decision of the EC to add Ghana to its list of countries defaulting in the anti-money laundering and the financing of terrorism framework, was unfair.
The ministry had observed that Ghana’s commitment to enforcing the anti-money laundering and the countering of financing terrorism framework has been acknowledged by the global standard regulatory body, the Financial Action Task Force [FATF]
The EC had argued that the countries were placed on the blacklist for having strategic deficiencies in their anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing frameworks.
But in rejecting the proposal, EU member states said in a statement issued on Thursday, March 7, 2019, that the proposal “was not established in a transparent and resilient process.”
Also included on the list were nations such as Saudi Arabia, North Korea and Nigeria, and four U.S. overseas territories.
The list is used to increase checks and investigations on financial transactions from those countries and territories to find suspicious money flows.
With the rejection, DGN Online understands that the EU Commission will now have to set up a new list and take the concerns of the member states into consideration.
Some newcomers to the list are Nigeria, Libya, Botswana, Samoa, the Bahamas and the four United States territories of American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Guam.
The other listed states are Afghanistan, North Korea, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia and Yemen.
BY Melvin Tarlue