On Friday, Bosnia and Herzegovina will end up on the gray list of Moneyval, an international institution that represents the supervisory body of the Council of Europe for monitoring money laundering and terrorist financing.
For BiH, this means that it is marked as an unsafe country for investment with potential problems with transactions.
By the way, this is our return to the gray list considering that we were already on it from 2015 to 2018. The countries on this list are countries that have serious deficiencies in the money laundering and terrorist financing system, but are still working to eliminate it. In addition to the gray list, there is also a black list.
In the past months, it was obvious that Bosnia and Herzegovina would end up on the Moneyvala gray list again, and this became guaranteed after the meeting of the Moneyvala authorities last month in Helsinki. Then a recommendation was issued for BiH to be officially placed on the gray list, which will ultimately happen on Friday.
According to unofficial information from Klix.ba, a plenary session of Moneyvala is scheduled for Friday, where they make the final decision on putting countries on the gray list, and today a subcommittee session was held where the BiH delegation was also informed of the decision to place BiH on the gray list.
One of the key reasons why Moneyval returns us to the gray list is the fact that the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina has not established a register of real owners of legal entities. The Ministry of Justice, headed by Vedran Škobić (HDZ), has not even started work on this registry, while in the Republic of Srpska this work has long been completed.
The authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina then tried to “soften” Moneyval’s decision by adopting the Bill on limiting the disposal of assets with the aim of preventing terrorism, financing terrorism and financing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. However, Moneyvala said at the May meeting that the adoption came too late.
In addition to the notification that BiH ended up on the gray list, the authorities should also receive from Moneyval an action plan that must be fulfilled if we want to be removed from that list. The plan will include technical and operational tasks, i.e. adoption of the law, but also implementation on the ground, he writes Klix.
