Following its placement on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list, the Prince’s Government has committed to a strict timetable to leave the list, as agreed during the recent plenary meeting in Singapore.

The FATF’s official declaration acknowledged significant progress made by the Principality since Moneyval’s recommendations in January last year. Notable improvements include bolstering counter-terrorism financing efforts, creating a new supervisory and financial intelligence authority, implementing targeted financial sanctions, and enhancing risk-based supervision of associations.

A detailed timetable has been set, spanning 18 months until January 2026, with intermediate milestones in May and September next year. Monaco has affirmed its determination to meet the latest FATF recommendations within these deadlines.

The FATF declaration reads: “In June 2024, Monaco made a high-level political commitment to work with the FATF and Moneyval to strengthen the effectiveness of its AML/CFT regime. Since the adoption of its mutual evaluation report (MER) in December 2022, Monaco has made significant progress on several of the MER’s recommended actions including by establishing a new combined financial intelligence unit (FIU) and AML/CFT supervisor, strengthening its approach to detecting and investigating terrorism financing, implementing targeted financial sanctions and risk-based supervision of non- profit organisations.

Monaco will continue to work with FATF to implement its action plan by: (1) strengthening the understanding of risk in relation to money laundering and income tax fraud committed abroad; (2) demonstrating a sustained increase in outbound requests to identify and seek the seizure of criminal assets abroad (3) enhancing the application of sanctions for AML/CFT breaches and breaches of basic and beneficial ownership requirements; (4) completing its resourcing program for its FIU and strengthen the quality and timeliness of STR reporting; (5) enhancing judicial efficiency, including through increasing resources of investigative judges and prosecutors and the application of effective, dissuasive and proportionate sanctions for money laundering; and (6) increasing the seizure of property suspected to derive from criminal activities.”