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UAE minister hopes country will come out of the FATF Grey List early next year

Al Zeyoudi says a FATF team will visit the country later this year

Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, the UAE’s Minister of State for Foreign Trade and chairman of the Emirates Bullion Committee, hopes that the country will come out of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Grey List early next year, which will help attract more precious metal companies.

While delivering a special address at the Dubai Precious Metals Conference on Tuesday, Al Zeyoudi said a FATF team will visit the country later this year for the evaluation.

“We are doing an excellent job on FATF. We are almost done. We are just waiting for the visit before the end of the year. Hopefully, we will be removed from the grey list. So we are looking forward to more industry people and corporations and companies to come and operate and work from the UAE,” the minister said during the speech.

The UAE was added to the Grey List in March 2022 and since then it has taken numerous measures to enhance the AML/CTF regulatory regime.

FATF’s Grey List, also known as jurisdiction under increased monitoring list, includes countries that are actively working with the Paris-based body to address strategic deficiencies in their regimes to counter money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation financing.

In October, Jordan, the Cayman Islands, Panama, and Albania were removed from the Grey List. There were 23 countries on the Grey List last month.

The FATF also said in October that the UAE substantially introduced compliance measures needed for its removal from the multilateral body’s list of countries under enhanced monitoring in areas such as facilitating money-laundering investigations, imposing sanctions on non-compliance at financial institutions, and increasing prosecutions. The task force said it would therefore conduct on-site visits to verify that these changes would be sustained.

Precious metals as a whole and gold in particular represent one of the largest non-oil trade sectors in UAE’s economy. The UAE is the world’s third-largest trading hub for gold.

Al Zeyoudi added that the precious metals sector is one of the most important parts of the UAE’s non-oil economy, with gold representing a quarter of the UAE’s Dh1.24 trillion non-oil trade in the first half of the year.

He pointed out that the ministry will continue to sign agreements with more countries that are important for trading precious metals including countries in Africa and South America.

“We are also revamping the whole market of gold and precious metal. We are doing new studies on the market,” he said.