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Lebanon

Lebanon’s FATF Grey-Listing: From Money Transfers to Aid Disruptions: How Lebanon’s Financial Blacklisting Hampers International Business and Humanitarian Operations (June 12, 2025)

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On June 10, 2025, the European Commission formally moved Lebanon into its “high-risk” category for money laundering and terrorist financing, a stark signal that, despite years of incremental reforms, the country’s AML/CFT safeguards still fall short of global expectations. This brief examines the immediate and cascading impacts of blacklisting: steeply rising costs and delays in cross-border payments, a chilling effect on foreign direct investment and profit repatriation, legal and operational snarls hindering humanitarian and development aid, and the deepening trust deficit that threatens Lebanon’s financial recovery.

In the pages that follow, we unpack each of these challenges in detail, tracing how enhanced duediligence requirements strain banking corridors, how investor confidence falters under heightened compliance risk, how donor restrictions and procedural bottlenecks imperil vital aid programs, and how a comprehensive reform roadmap is the only path back to global financial markets. SARI Global stands ready to support with targeted business intelligence and enhanced due diligence solutions.