Hurdles in business with the world goes

Bangladesh has come out of the grey list of Financial Action Task Force, a global watchdog on money laundering, meaning it will reduce the costs and timeline of the country's financial transactions with the rest of the world.
“We were trying to get out of the list for five years, and finally we have succeeded,” Finance Minister AMA Muhith said at a press conference in the capital yesterday.
The grey list is an index of countries identified by the FATF as having strategic deficiencies in systems in fighting money laundering and terrorist financing.

Financial transactions involving Bangladeshi businessmen and institutions were complicated and cumbersome for the country's being on the list.
Foreign banks usually charge from 0.25 to 0.5 percent for facilitating payments for international trade, but the charge went upwards of 1 percent for Bangladeshi businessmen, according to Abu Hena Mohammed Raji Hasan, deputy governor of Bangladesh Bank.
The decision to drop Bangladesh from the list came at the FATF's plenary on February 13, following a review of the country's progress under the time-bound action plan provided by the global body in October 2010.
The government has fulfilled most of the 28 tasks that include criminalising money laundering and terrorist financing, establishing and implementing procedures to identify and freeze terrorist assets, and implementing procedures for confiscating funds related to money laundering.
As part of its efforts to combat money laundering and terrorist funding, the government set up Financial Intelligence Unit, headed by Hasan, to detect suspicious transactions and coordinate with government agencies.
In November last year, a team of FATF's Asia-Pacific Regional Review Group visited Bangladesh to verify the government measures.
“The FATF welcomes Bangladesh's significant progress in improving its AML/CFT [anti-money laundering/combating the financing of terrorism] regime and notes that Bangladesh has established the legal and regulatory framework to meet its commitments in its action plan regarding the strategic deficiencies that the FATF had identified in October 2010,” the watchdog said in a statement.
“Bangladesh is therefore no longer subject to FATF's monitoring process under its on-going global AML/CFT compliance process,” it added.