The Financial Action Task Force has retained Barbados, Cayman Islands and Jamaica on the Grey List, citing strategic deficiencies in their countering of money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation financing.

The decision came from the report on the FATF’s most recent Paris meeting in October.

While the FATF had the strongest warnings for Jamaica, they classed the three island countries among those jurisdictions under increased monitoring, actively working with the FATF to address strategic deficiencies in their regimes to counter money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing.

The FATF expressed concern that Jamaica failed to complete its action plan, which fully expired in January 2022.

The FATF strongly urged Jamaica “to swiftly demonstrate significant progress in completing its action plan by the February 2023 deadline or the FATF will consider next steps if there is insufficient progress”.

Fixing their strategic deficiencies would mean:

•including all financial institutions and designated non-financial businesses and professions in the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing regime and ensuring adequate, risk-based supervision in all sectors.

•taking appropriate measures to prevent legal persons and arrangements from being misused for criminal purposes, and ensuring that accurate and up-to-date basic and beneficial ownership information is available on a timely basis to competent authorities.

•implementing a risk-based approach for supervision of the Non-Profit Organisations sector to prevent abuse for terrorist financing purposes.

The FATF has told Barbados that all of their deadlines to fix deficiencies have expired and they should “swiftly” complete an action plan to address their strategic deficiencies by February 2023.

Specifically, they were urged to:

•take appropriate measures to prevent legal persons and arrangements from being misused for criminal purposes, and ensuring that accurate and up-to-date basic and beneficial ownership information is available on a timely basis.

•demonstrate that money laundering investigations and prosecutions are in line with the country’s risk profile.

•further pursue confiscation in money laundering cases, including by repatriating or sharing confiscated assets with other countries.

Cayman Islands was similarly told they had until February to resolve outstanding issues.

Specifically, Cayman has been told to demonstrate they are prosecuting all types of money laundering cases in line with the jurisdiction’s risk profile and that such prosecutions are resulting in the application of dissuasive, effective, and proportionate sanctions.

The Financial Action Task Force is a Paris-based intergovernmental organisation founded by the G-7 group to develop policies to combat global money laundering and terrorist financing.

The FATF publishes a Black List as a benchmark for international sanctions, listing as targets countries found to be non-cooperative in the global fight against money laundering and terrorist financing.

The Grey List serves as a warning for countries to be compliant to the directions, at the expense of being blacklisted.