The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has slammed the Qatar Central Bank (QCB) for making little effort to enforce its regulations banning virtual asset service providers.
In a report published on May 31, the global anti-money laundering and terrorism financing watchdog highlighted the need for Qatar to improve its capabilities to effectively combat evolving forms of criminal activity, including sanctioning virtual asset service providers .
"It needs to improve understanding of more complex forms of money laundering and terrorism financing," it said. In December 2019, the Qatar Financial Center Regulatory Authority (QFCRA) announced that virtual asset services may not be conducted in or from the Qatar ar Financial Center . The regulator warned at the time that penalties would be imposed on the rights and obligations of any company offering or facilitating the offering or exchange of crypto assets under the QFCRA.
According to a recent FATF report, while Qatar has made “positive and continuing progress” in collecting beneficial ownership information for its near-completed Unified Register integrating data on its citizens more work remains to be done: "There are still insufficient controls in p place to ensure that all information collected is accurate and up to date."
Qatari authorities have been urged to step up investigations into money laundering, saying their "sophisticated analytical capabilities" to identify incidents of money laundering have been underutilized. While Qatar has banned virtual asset service providers, it has revealed that it is actively exploring the potential use case of implementing a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
It was previously reported that in June 2022, the QCB was in the “foundational stages” of issuing a CBDC. Qatar Central Bank Governor Sheikh Bandar bin Mohammed bin Saoud Al Thani revealed at the time that the QCB was “assessing the pros and cons of a CBDC” and working on suitable technologies and platforms.
