UAE: Placement in FATF’s “Grey-list” and UK high risk third countries list
By Christina Poursanidou, EU Qualified Lawyer and FCC Officer As presented by FATF’s Mutual Evaluation Report [1] in early 2020, the UAE is exposed to significant ML and TF risks, due to its cash intensive economy, the large size of its financial sector, the expansion of the FFZs and the big volume of trade in gold and precious stones. Despite the significant improvements made by the UAE, there are still significant deficiencies and fundamental improvements are needed, in order to demonstrate that the system cannot be used for illegal purposes. Last month, UAE made a high-level political commitment to strengthen the effectiveness of its AML/CFT regime. Although, during March 2022 the seat of UAE in AML Compliance map was going to change significantly. The starting point was when FATF, on 4th of March, placed UAE into its list of countries subject to increased monitoring, the so-called “grey list”. Greylisted jurisdictions are under increased monitoring by FATF, while they are active
