LAHORE: Prime Minister’s Adviser on Interior and Accountability Shehzad Akbar has directed the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to play its effective role in achieving the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) targets ahead of its forthcoming meeting in March/April.

During his visit to the FIA provincial headquarters here on Thursday, he held a meeting with the additional director general (north) and directors Punjab zones I and II.

“Mr Akbar emphasised achieving the FATF targets for the upcoming APG/ plenary review in March/April, 2022. The FIA was also directed to aggressively pursue mega money laundering cases,” an official told Dawn. He said the government was keen on meeting all targets set by the FATF at the earliest and all stations of the agency and other related departments were directed to expedite their efforts.

On a suggestion, Mr Akbar agreed to set up joint working groups of the State Bank of Pakistan, the Financial Monitoring Unit and the FIA for improving the quality of suspicious transactions reports (STRs) for efficiency in anti-money laundering (AML) investigations.

Agency retrieves seven-kanal property from illegal users

The FATF in October last had announced that Pakistan would remain on its increased monitoring list, also called the grey list. Pakistan has been on the grey list for deficiencies in its counter-terror financing and anti-money laundering regimes since June 2018.

FATF President Dr Marcus Pleyer had said that Pakistan had to complete two concurrent action plans with a total of 34 items. “It has now addressed or largely addressed 30 of the items. Overall, Pakistan is making good progress on this new action plan. Four out of the seven items are now addressed or largely addressed,” he said and added that Pakistan had taken a number of important steps but needed to further demonstrate that investigations and prosecutions were being pursued against the senior leadership of UN-designated terror groups.

Mr Akbar also conducted a need assessment of the FIA field offices in terms of enhancing capacity and effectiveness of organisation. He was told that most of the FIA offices in the province had been functioning in rented buildings. Mr Akbar said the government would look into this matter and address the issue.

He was also briefed on the FIA’s ongoing “mega operation” against illegal occupants of federal government’s properties.

On Thursday, the FIA retrieved a seven-kanal industrial godown at Badami Bagh, Lahore. “It was built on Evacuee Trust Property Board land worth Rs2.7bn illegally and converted into commercial venture in 2012 in connivance with Asif Akhtar Hashmi, former chairman ETPB,” the agency said.

Besides, two shops measuring five marla each housing TCS and hotel at Dayal Singh Mansion, Mall Road worth Rs65 million have been retrieved.

The FIA claims to have retrieved land worth over Rs17.7bn in the ongoing drive to recover prime urban ETPB lands/properties in various parts of the country. It has registered more than 40 FIRs against 120 suspects -- present and former officials of the ETPB, revenue department as well as private people -- for their alleged involvement in illegal occupation of the ETPB properties, non-payment of rent for years and violation of lease contracts, thus causing a loss to the exchequer.

Published in Dawn, January 7th, 2022