The Budget Committee has undertaken to clear Bulgaria's name from the “gray” list for money laundering

The Parliamentary Committee on Budget and Finance has undertaken to clear Bulgaria's name from the “grey” list of money laundering countries compiled by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). At its meeting on Wednesday, the committee adopted at second reading amendments to the Law on Measures against the Financing of Terrorism (LMFT), which will help remove our country from the list in question, BTA reports.

The adoption of the proposed amendments will represent significant progress in the implementation of the FATF Action Plan for Bulgaria, which is a necessary requirement for reducing the period during which the country appears on the list and for its removal from it," the explanatory memorandum to the bill states.

We would like to remind you that in October 2024, it became clear that Bulgaria had been included in the FATF's shameful “grey” list for nearly a year as a jurisdiction with strategic weaknesses in money laundering and terrorist financing. With Bulgaria joining a group of about 20 countries – half of which are African, such as Somalia, Yemen, and Syria – a set of recommendations was drawn up for Bulgaria to implement in order to be removed from the shameful list. One of them was precisely changes in legislation.

Being included in the FATF's “grey list” is not in itself due to the detection of money laundering cases, but rather to weaknesses in the mechanisms for combating money laundering and terrorist financing and the placing of these countries under “enhanced monitoring.”

Bulgaria's presence on the list is also an obstacle to the country's entry into the eurozone. In its regular convergence report in 2024, the European Central Bank (ECB) highlighted this factor as a shortcoming.

Translated with DeepL.