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February 24,2018 Pakistan’s Interior Minister on Saturday said authorities were taking steps not to please the US but for the country’s own benefit, a day after Islamabad avoided being placed in a watch-list by a global watchdog. Pakistan escaped from being placed on the watch-list of countries that have failed to combat terror financing and counter money laundering, state-run Pakistan Television reported. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), in a report issued yesterday, named nine countries with “strategic deficiencies,” including Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Tunisia. Pakistan escaped mention. Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal said that the FATF will decide in June whether to place Pakistan on the ‘grey list’ of countries with strategic deficiencies that pose a risk to the international financial system. The decision was taken at an extraordinary second vote towards the end of the five-day plenary session of the group in Paris, he said. It was a shock for Pakistan as just tw...

Tavleen Singh, February 25,2018 When you have covered politics and government as long as I have, you develop a healthy distrust of officials and politicians. So what worries me about the  Nirav Modi  story is that the officials have remained faceless. This is something they are very good at doing when something bad happens. They simply vanish into the bowels of government offices to which ordinary citizens have no access, and disappear behind rules that only they fully understand. They get away with this because most of us intrepid investigative journalists are socialist by nature and hence inclined to believe that the denizens of the mighty Indian State can do no real wrong. Politicians we routinely like to revile but somehow officials escape. Something like this is already beginning to happen in the fascinating tale of Nirav Modi. In the past week we have learned everything there is to know about the man who (if all allegations prove true) could be the most successfu...

Waqas Shabbir, February 26,2018 United Kingdom was an ally of the US when both countries put forward the motion to put Pakistan on the terror watch-list for its failure to comply with the global anti-money laundering and terror financing requirements. Given the critical nature of the issue and its importance to Pakistan’s economic survival, it could potentially hurt all the efforts thus far to revive the economy. But the money laundering policies of the countries enticing the motion are questionable. Do Trump and the UK both adhere by the anti-money laundering policies? Why is London called the dirty money capital? The report by Transparency International on the London property market indicates that there is no data available on the real owners of more than half of the 44,022 land titles owned by overseas companies in London. 91 percent of these properties were bought via secrecy jurisdictions [such as those named in the Panama and Paradise Papers]. Moreover, 75 perc...

Prabhudatta Misra, February 26,2018 If market prices of chana, a rabi pulse, remain at the current levels through the season, the Centre and states will have to fork out a whopping Rs 6,400 crore to ensure farmers get the minimum support price (MSP) for the crop by way of deficiency payments. And that is just about one crop in one season. The cost to the exchequer will multiply and could easily be in the vicinity of an annual Rs 80,000 crore estimated by FE earlier if all volumes of farm produce — except fruits and vegetables — that are not procured by the government at the respective MSPs are to be given prompt and complete deficiency price support, as promised in the recent Union Budget. Indeed, these are estimates based on current MSPs; if the MSP is 1.5 times the A2+FL cost as proposed in the Budget, then the cost to the exchequer to keep the Budget promise of price support to farmers would be even higher. While fresh arrivals of chana are fetching 20% below the MSP, whea...

Shubhajit Roy, February 26,2018 TWO DAYS after Beijing lifted its objection to put Pakistan in the grey listing at the Financial Action Task Force, India on Sunday congratulated China for becoming the vice chair of the global body, which is mandated to combat terror financing, and hoped Beijing would “uphold and support” the objective of the watchdog in a balanced and objective way. On Friday, the FATF placed Pakistan under monitoring in its International Cooperation Review Group until June 2018 for compliance of Anti-Money Laundering and Combating Finance of Terrorism regulations. This was possible after Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale travelled to Beijing, and played a role in convincing the Chinese to stop objecting to the US proposal on placing Pakistan on the grey list. This came with India’s assurance to China that it will support Beijing’s leadership role in FATF. Consequently, on Sunday, Ministry of External Affairs’s official spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted, “Co...

Jyoti Malhotra, February 26,2018 IN WHAT amounts to a significant diplomatic outreach to Pakistan, India has invited its Commerce Minister, Pervaiz Malik, to participate in the informal WTO ministerial meeting taking place in Delhi on March 19-20. Malik is said to have confirmed his attendance. The invitation to Malik comes in the wake of the late-December secret back-channel negotiations between the two national security advisors, Ajit Doval and Nasser Janjua, first reported in The Indian Express, and takes place after the global Financial Action Task Force (FATF) threatened to isolate Pakistan over the weekend if it didn’t stop using terrorism as an instrument of state policy. As the decision to participate in the SAARC summit, to be held in Pakistan, comes up again for consideration by the Centre — India and several other South Asian nations had refused to go last year, ensuring a cancellation of the summit — Delhi is planning a more nuanced Pakistan policy than it has...

February 26,2018 The CBI has registered a case against Simbhaoli Sugars Limited, its Chairman Gurmit Singh Mann, Deputy Managing Director Gurpal Singh and others in connection with an alleged bank loan fraud of Rs 97.85 crore. The CBI on Sunday carried out searches at eight premises including residences of the directors, factory, corporate office and registered office of the company in Delhi, Hapur and Noida, CBI spokesperson Abhishek Dayal said. The probe focuses on two loans — Rs 97.85 crore which was declared fraud in 2015 and another corporate loan of Rs 110 crore which was used to repay the previous loan. The second loan was declared NPA on November 29, 2016, nearly 20 days after scrapping of Rs 1,000 and old Rs 500 notes was announced, according to the CBI FIR. The bank was allegedly cheated to the tune of Rs 97.85 crore, but the loss incurred by the bank is Rs 109.08 crore, the FIR read. The lender, Oriental Bank of Commerce, complained to the CBI on Nov...

February 25,2018 Pakistan's Bin Laden is trying to game the system by putting up independent candidates in elections For the world, he is the most wanted man, the founder and chief of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a frontal charity organisation to conceal LeT's militant activities. The LeT is accused of organising mass killing of hundreds in the deadly Mumbai attacks in 2008 and is responsible for carrying out terrorist activities in India. Pakistan's recent policy shift in passing a decree banning the operations of religious seminaries and outlets under LeT's banner has surfaced to preclude the threat of international sanctions ahead of a Financial Action Task Force (FATF) meeting due this week in Paris. The organisers of FATF have coerced the home government to issue an Anti-terrorism Ordinance 2018; none other than President Mamnoon Hussain issued it as he introduced an amendment to the Anti-terrorism Act, 1977. However, it'...

Saurabh Kumar, February 25,2018 To deepen ties between Saudi Arabia and India, the oil-rich nation’s Saudi Aramco oil company plans to invest in Indian refineries apart from the West Coast refinery. “Aramco is also looking at other opportunities to buy into existing refineries in India and upgrades of existing refineries. So, there are at least three different tracks which I cannot reveal more specifics. One is the greenfield west coast refinery, which is already public, but there are discussions with expansions as well as buying stake into major existing refinery assets,” said Khalid al-Falih, the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, who is also the chairman of the company.“Agreements have been already signed that allows discussions to start on the configuration of the refinery, on design basis and pre-feasibility studies,” he said. This comes a day after Union petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan said the country has offered Saudi Arabia a stake in the future strategic oil reserve...

Khurram Hussain, February 25,2018 ALL through the day on Friday, as one news outlet after another from outside the country broke the news that things had not gone well for Pakistan at the plenary meetings of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) being held in Paris, the government here maintained an awkward silence. On Tuesday the motion advanced by the United States to ‘grey list’ Pakistan had been discussed, and Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif tweeted triumphantly that it was blocked due to opposition from “friends”. Later we heard that three countries in particular — Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, China and Turkey — were among those “friends” who had opposed the motion. Then suddenly on Friday morning, we heard things had changed on Thursday night. The motion had been put up for discussion one more time, in an unusual move, and this time our “friends” — specifically China and Saudi Arabia — withdrew their objections, allowing it to pass. All this we heard from international med...

 Amol Aggarwal, February 26,2018 The Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam has, at least momentarily, shocked the nation. Some headlines suggest this is the biggest banking fraud since Independence. Just a few days earlier, Bank of Baroda was in the news, but far less prominently, for very similar fraudulent activity in South Africa. Which leads one to wonder: what is going on Indian banking? One answer is: nothing new. Bank frauds and bank crises have been an integral part of Indian financial history. It is not for nothing that in 1913, John Maynard Keynes after surveying the state of banking in the country, wrote in  Indian Currency and Finance , “In a country so dangerous for banking as India, (it) should be conducted on the safest possible principles”. His warnings have proven prophetic. In fact, scams in Indian banking far predate Keynes’s warnings. The year 2017 was the 150th anniversary of the failure of the Presidency Bank of Bombay (PBB). The bank had been...