The Bahamas was removed from the European Commission’s List of Third-country Jurisdictions which have strategic deficiencies in their AML/CFT Regimes (AML Blacklist). This decision was finalized on January 7th, 2022, after The Bahamas was assessed under the European Commission’s revised methodology for identifying high-risk third countries in the last quarter of 2021.
The FATF de-listed The Bahamas from the list of Jurisdictions under Increased Monitoring in December 2020 after the country addressed the strategic deficiencies identified by the FATF. However, in April 2021, the European Commission identified deficiencies that the jurisdiction needed to address to meet the Commission’s required standards. According to a release by the Council of the European Union on January 10th, 2022, “The Bahamas has implemented measures which are sufficiently comprehensive and that meet the necessary requirements to consider that strategic deficiencies identified under article 9 of the Directive (EU) 2015/849 have been removed”. The measures taken by The Bahamas have strengthened its AML/CFT framework and focused on the transparency of its beneficial ownership regime. The European Commission stated that it will continue to work in collaboration with the FATF and CFATF to monitor the development of The Bahamas’ AML/CFT regime.
In addition to The Bahamas, The European Commission concluded that Botswana, Ghana, Iraq and Mauritius no longer have strategic deficiencies in their AML/CFT regime. In its Official Journal on February 21st, 2022, the EU noted that these countries have “strengthened the effectiveness of their AML/CFT regimes and addressed related technical deficiencies to meet the commitments in their action plans regarding the strategic deficiencies that the FATF identified as well as the Commission’s additional benchmarks or concerns”.