Fatima Alsancak

Recent decisions show that their concerns have not fallen on deaf ears, said Fatima Busra Alsancak, a research fellow at RUSI,the Royal United Services Institute in London, who previously served as a delegate for the Turkish government at FATF. "FATF is putting the right tools into place and it’s now up to the secretariat and assessors to ensure consistency, fairness, andthat specific risks and materiality are considered [in the new round of mutual evaluations],” Alsancak said. “Whether that will happen remains to be seen... FATF is both a technical and a political body, and its decisions are of course influenced by the geopolitical environment,” said Alsancak, the former delegate for Turkey. “We’re in a challenging moment globally.”

The core issues [reflected by the new methodology] lean slightly towards supervision, but ratings will probably be determined on a case-by-case basis,” Fatima Busra Alsancak, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, told ACAMS moneylaundering.com ... “FATF is trying to make sure that assessors know what questions to ask and where they should be looking in detail,” Alsancak said. “It may mean that countries will have to provide much more information to prove their effectiveness.”

[Russia is a good] ...case study in the deficiencies of the … FATF mutual evaluation process, which allows countries with high levels of institutionalised corruption to complete their evaluations despite the lack of integrity in their AML systems”.