ANKARA — Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz said on Thursday he expects the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to remove Turkey from its grey list next month.
The Paris-based international financial watchdog placed Turkey on its grey list in 2021, stepping up scrutiny on money laundering and terrorist financing and calling on the government to implement tougher measures to address those concerns.
“I think we will come off the FATF grey list in June,” Yilmaz told Reuters in an exclusive interview. “If we don’t, I think it will be for political reasons, not technical reasons. … I think Turkey fully meets the technical criteria,” he added.
His comments echoed a similar message from Turkish Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, who had previously said Turkey was expected to be removed from the list at the watchdog’s general meeting in June. The FATF is meeting in Singapore from June 23 to 28 and is due to release its country assessments on the final day of the meeting.
Yilmaz also said a FATF team visited Turkey earlier this month ahead of its June meeting.
The FATF said in February that Turkey had “made significant reforms” to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, including strengthening prosecutions of UN-designated terrorist groups. “Turkey has substantially completed its action plan,” the FATF said, referring to commitments the Turkish government made to the watchdog.
Removing Turkey from the grey list could strengthen the government’s efforts to boost foreign investor confidence. Such a move would also help lower Turkey’s CDS risk premium, which has been declining since the country’s transition to economic orthodoxy following the May 2023 general and presidential elections.
“CDS has fallen 435 basis points since May last year to 268 basis points, the lowest since February 2020,” Simsek wrote on social media platform X on Thursday.
Turkey’s economic management is seeking to attract more foreign capital to cushion the impact of the country’s worst financial crisis in recent history, with inflation reaching about 70 percent in April from a year earlier, official data showed.
