LatinNews Daily - 24 July 2023

*Panama’s President Laurentino Cortizo has underlined Panama’s commitment to financial transparency before a meeting of representatives of the Financial Action Group of Latin America (Gafilat), an associate member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Addressing representatives at the summit which was taking place in Panama’s capital, Panama City, Cortizo said that the country had established national policies to continue with preventing and combatting money laundering and the financing of terrorism. It comes as Cortizo continues to underline efforts to remove Panama from the FATF’s grey list of countries that are not doing enough to combat money laundering; the country has faced major pressure in recent years to tackle transparency in its financial system following the April 2016 ‘Panama Papers’ scandal, when over 11m confidential documents were leaked from the offices of the now defunct Panama-based offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca. More immediately this pressure has come from the FATF which in February 2023 urged Panama to fully address remaining measures in its action plan as all timelines had expired in January 2021.