(6)In February 2022, the UAE made a high-level political commitment to work with the FATF and the Middle East and North Africa Financial Action Task Force to strengthen the effectiveness of its AML/CFT regime. Since then, the UAE demonstrated positive progress, including by providing additional resources to the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to strengthen the FIU analysis and providing financial intelligence to Law Enforcement Authorities and the Public Prosecutors for combating of high-risk ML threats. The UAE should continue to work to implement its FATF action plan by: (1) demonstrating through case studies and statistics a sustained increase in outbound Mutual Legal Assistance requests to help facilitate investigation of Terrorism Financing (TF), Money-Laundering (ML), and high-risk predicates; (2) enhancing and maintaining a shared understanding of the ML/TF risks between the different DNFBP sectors and institutions; (3) showing an increase in the number and quality of STRs filed by FIs and Designated Non-Financial Businesses and Professions (DNFBPs); (4) ensuring a more granular understanding of the risk of abuse of legal persons and, where applicable, legal arrangements, for ML/TF; (5) demonstrate greater use of financial intelligence to pursue high-risk ML threats; and demonstrating a sustained increase in effective investigations and prosecutions of different types of ML cases consistent with the UAE’s risk profile; and (6) proactively identifying and combating sanctions evasion, including by demonstrating a better understanding of sanctions evasion among the private sector. Despite that commitment and progress, the concerns that led to the listing of the UAE by the FATF have not yet been fully addressed. The UAE should therefore be considered as a country that has strategic deficiencies in its AML/CFT regime under Article 9 of Directive (EU) 2015/849.