The Guernsey Financial Services Commission has removed Iceland from Appendix C (Equivalent Jurisdictions) of its Handbook on Countering Financial Crime and Terrorist Financing and has instructed all specified business to apply full 'customer due diligence' or CDD to all existing business relationships connected to Iceland by 31 January.

This action is a result of the Financial Action Task Force’s recent finding of strategic deficiencies in Iceland’s regime for tackling money laundering and terrorist finance. The commission says that it cannot consider Iceland to be an 'equivalent' jurisdiction with AML/CFT standards and supervision which meet the FATF's 40 Recommendations.

Iceland (along with Mongolia, Pakistan and Zimbabwe) is now on the FATF's so-called 'grey list' whose official name is "other monitored jurisdictions." The FATF blacklist, now called the "call for action," is an approximate reincarnation of the old, discredited, list of "non-co-operative countries and territories" which the FATF abandoned a decade ago because it was too obviously political.