Azerbaijan has improved its measures for tackling money laundering and combating financing of terrorism, concludes Council of Europe’s body MONEYVAL in a follow-up report released today.

MONEYVAL finds that Azerbaijan has made progress in addressing the technical compliance deficiencies impacting the application of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) standards.

The compliance rating of Azerbaijan was upgraded on the FATF recommendations on non-profit organisations (assessing risk of terrorist financing abuse of NPOs and applying risk-based measures); on money or value transfer services (ensuring that such service providers are licensed or registered and monitored); on wire transfers; on transparency and beneficial ownership of legal persons (including but not limited to assessing the risks of misuse of legal persons for money laundering or terrorist financing, and taking measures to prevent their misuse); on regulation and supervision of financial institutions; on statistics (maintaining comprehensive statistics on matters relevant to the effectiveness and efficiency of the AML/CFT system), as well as on guidance and feedback to be provided by the authorities to defined market players to assist them in countering money laundering and terrorist financing (Recommendations 8, 14, 16, 24, 26, 33 and 34).

Overall, out of the 40 recommendations, Azerbaijan is currently rated as:

• Compliant with FATF standards on eight recommendations;
• Largely compliant on 28 recommendations;
• Partially compliant on three recommendations;
• Non-compliant on one recommendation.

Azerbaijan will remain in enhanced follow-up process. The country is invited to report back on its overall progress in strengthening AML/CFT measures in one year’s time.

Moneyval and Azerbaijan

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The Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism (MONEYVAL) is a Council of Europe monitoring body and a Financial Action Task Force-Style Regional Body which assesses compliance with the main international standards to counter money laundering, the financing of terrorism and the financing of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as the effectiveness of their implementation. It comprises 35 jurisdictions, 32 of which are assessed solely by MONEYVAL.