Turkey has made significant progress in addressing the deficiencies in its anti-money laundering/terrorist finance regime that inspectors identified in the Financial Action Task Force's woeful 'mutual evaluation report' of February 2007.

Turkey has made significant progress in addressing the deficiencies in its anti-money laundering/terrorist finance regime that inspectors identified in the Financial Action Task Force's woeful 'mutual evaluation report' of February 2007. The assessment team in that year rated Turkey non-compliant or partially compliant with five out of six 'core recommendations' (there are 40 in all) and partially compliant on five out of 10 'key recommendations'. As a result, the FATF placed Turkey in a 'follow-up process', i.e. one step away from sanctions. The follow-up process is a desk-based review that monitors a country's progress in its reforms. Since 2007, Turkey has:

• amended the money laundering offence in its criminal code by lowering the threshold for predicate offences and including elements required by the relevant United Nations conventions;

• framed new regulations and amendments to existing regulations, with the aim of strengthening requirements for customer identification and verification, beneficial ownership, risk and 'simplified/enhanced due diligence';

• strengthened the reporting requirements for suspected terrorist financing transactions; and

• adopted a new regime to help it prevent terrorist finance.

As a result of this progress, Turkey has taken sufficient steps to be removed from the follow-up process.