Tehran, Iran, Feb.16
Trend:
The Head of Iran`s planning and budget organization said that the adoption of FATF bills would make the transactions of the country harder.
"In the current situation, the country faces many problems with the transfer of money, and except for a few countries, the rest do not cooperate with Iran,” the head of planning and budget organization Mohammad-Bagher Nobakht said, Trend reports citing ICANA.
He noted that even Iran’s allies have said that if Iran does not join FATF, they cannot continue their exchange with the Islamic Republic.
"If our allies do not exchange currency with Iran, the imports and transactions will be harder," he added.
Members of the Expediency Council met to review the Joining Palermo bill, one of the FATF bills, but Iran’s Expediency Council failed to reach a consensus over a parliamentary bill on Iran’s accession to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, as members have postponed voting on the FATF-related bill.
A member of the Expediency Council, Gholamreza Mesbahi, announced that the Council held a session to study any possible connections between the four FATF-related bills and the EU’s trade mechanism for Iran (INSTEX), but the session concluded that there was no connection between the FATF-related bills and the EU’s payment channel.
Out of four parliamentary bills required for Iran’s accession to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), only two of have so far gone into effect.
A bill amending Iran’s Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) law and a bill on Iran’s accession to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime are still problematic in the eyes of the Guardian Council, the legislative watchdog.
The FATF announced late last year that it extends the deadline for Iran to complete reforms to meet conditions for getting out of the body’s black list until the February meeting.
The upcoming Financial Action Task Force meeting is to be held in Paris on February 17-22.
No Iranian representative will attend the upcoming FATF meeting.