Why only Khamenei can break deadlock over global watchdog blacklist
The heavily politicized debate in Iran over whether to ratify bills necessary to exit the FATF blacklist has reached a standstill that only the supreme leader seems able to break.
At its recent plenary meeting, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global group working against money laundering and the financing of terrorism, decided against removing Iran from its blacklist while continuing to waive its countermeasures until October. However, developments following the June 29 meeting indicate a serious likelihood that Tehran will approve legislation pertaining to its efforts to permanently exit the blacklist.
On June 20, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei met with parliament members and implicitly warned them against accepting parts of the proposed bills to comply with the action plan agreed with the FATF, saying, “There is no need to accept things due to some of their positive aspects when we do not know where they are leading and when we do know that they have some flaws.”
Recent reports, however, point to a potential meeting between President Hassan Rouhani and parliament speaker Ali Larijani with Khamenei over the FATF. Some parliament members have even gone as far as suggesting that the supreme leader has already hinted his agreement to measures demanded by the FATF.
In the past two years, the Rouhani administration has submitted four FATF-related bills for parliament’s approval so that Iran can be permanently removed from the organization’s blacklist. These bills call for Iran’s accession to the convention for the fight against money laundering, the convention for the suppression of terrorist financing, the convention against transnational organized crime and the convention to combat the financing of terrorism (CFT). At the same time, the Iranian administration has repeatedly declared that it “has no intention to join the FATF.”
