Türkiye passed most of the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) anti-money-laundering standards in the global watchdog’s fifth-round mutual evaluation, the peer-review exercise that grades countries on both their written rules and how well those rules work in practice, according to a report released on Wednesday. The assessment builds on the jurisdiction’s progress since it exited the FATF gray list in June 2024 — the watchdog’s track for jurisdictions subject to increased monitoring — but the country is not yet in the clear: it was placed under enhanced follow-up because of an extensive backlog of unprosecuted financial crime cases that the FATF says must be closed within three years.

How Türkiye performed in the FATF review

Türkiye was graded compliant or largely compliant on 38 of the 40 recommendations — the FATF’s baseline rulebook against money laundering and terrorist financing that jurisdictions are expected to implement at home — in the FATF’s fifth-round mutual evaluation. The country received partially compliant ratings for the remaining recommendations, according to the report and’s Treasury and Finance Ministry.

Türkiye fared less well on the harder assessment of the effectiveness of its rules, earning three substantial and eight moderate ratings across 11 testing areas.

The enhanced follow-up designation is not a blacklist; it is a reporting requirement obliging Türkiye to update the FATF more frequently on how it is closing the gaps flagged in the report. The country was placed in the same category after its previous evaluation in 2019.

In a statement issued the same day, the Treasury and Finance Ministry ruled out any return to the gray list, pointing to the FATF assessment as confirmation that Türkiye does not have any critical deficiencies in tackling money laundering, terrorist financing or the financing of weapons of mass destruction.

What the FATF wants Türkiye to do

The FATF said not enough cases reach a courtroom verdict, even though Türkiye has improved in some problem areas, including the use of financial intelligence and cooperation with foreign counterparts. The regulator highlighted the effectiveness problem, writing: “Challenges in fully translating investigations into judicial outcomes have resulted in a backlog of more than 7000 cases pending prosecution.”

The report also called out a structural issue with Turkish law. In many cases, authorities can only issue administrative sanctions against companies because they cannot apply criminal liability to legal persons, an enforcement tool that is standard in many other jurisdictions. The FATF considers that system insufficient for a country with Türkiye’s risk profile.

Money-laundering cases in Turkish courts reached 12,629 at the end of 2025, according to the BirGün news outlet, with 17,969 defendants and 28,477 underlying offenses awaiting judgment.

A three-year roadmap, with crypto in scope

The FATF handed Ankara a set of Key Recommended Actions to complete within three years. They include sharpening its grasp of terrorist-financing risks, pushing harder on money-laundering cases tied to high-risk predicate offenses such as drug trafficking, smuggling and illegal betting, lifting the rate of convictions, and tracing and recovering criminal assets moved abroad. Countries that miss the three-year mark face escalation, up to a high-level mission to gauge the government’s political will.

Virtual asset service providers — the FATF’s term for crypto exchanges, custodial wallet providers and similar businesses — sit inside the picture. Because FATF recommendations form the baseline that national supervisors implement for crypto oversight, the findings double as a progress report on where Türkiye’s crypto-compliance regime stands as its framework matures. The FATF noted that a regulatory framework for VASPs was still being rolled out during the on-site visit in November 2025, and that supervisors had ramped up risk-based compliance checks on financial institutions and crypto platforms, with extra attention on higher-risk entities. It found that firms generally understand their money-laundering exposure and obligations, while their handling of terrorist-financing risk and suspicious-transaction reporting still lags outside the banking sector.

Where the pressure lands next

Ankara says the follow-up work will run through national strategies on money laundering, terrorist financing and asset confiscation for 2026–2030, plus a proliferation-financing plan for 2025–2029. Whether those translate into more prosecutions and recovered assets is the exact question the FATF has told Türkiye to answer on a clock.

The scrutiny lands against a backdrop of long-standing outside criticism of Türkiye’s exposure to illicit flows. Analysts at Nordic Monitor argued earlier this year that a proposed 20-year tax exemption on foreign-sourced income for new residents — a plan floated by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — could widen laundering channels absent tougher source-of-funds checks.