The Falcon Leaves, the Money Never Follows

In June 2020 the Financial Action Task Force ("FATF") published "Money Laundering and the Illegal Wildlife Trade", the first global study of the finances of wildlife crime, and its finding was blunt: the trade generates criminal proceeds of between seven and twenty-three billion US Dollars every year, moved through shell companies, front businesses and mobile payments, while the countries which lose the animals almost never pursue the money. The prescription was equally blunt: treat wildlife trafficking as a predicate offence to money laundering and follow the money rather than merely confiscating the animal, since the animal is replaceable to the syndicate and the money is not.

Pakistan should read that report as a description of itself.

On 17th October 2020, Pakistan Customs seized seventy-five falcons and houbara bustards in and around Karachi, in an operation without precedent; the birds, saker and peregrine falcons trapped in the mountainous north for the falconry camps of the Gulf, were valued at more than Rs 200 million, and two suspects were arrested. WWF-Pakistan estimates up to seven hundred falcons smuggled out of the country in a single year (Agence France-Presse, 4th January 2021). A trial court found for the claimed owners on 31st May 2021; the departments appealed; and while the appeal waited before the Honourable Sindh High Court, the birds sat caged in official custody through two Karachi summers.

By 11th March 2022, seventy-one of the seventy-six seized birds were dead in the custody of the state (Arab News, 11th March 2022).

No conviction stands; and at no stage did any forum ask about the money: who financed the trapping teams, through which channel the Gulf buyer's consideration travelled, and in whose account Rs 200 million of "proceeds of crime" came to rest. Very unfortunately, that silence is not the fault of the investigating officers; it is the architecture of the law itself.

A statute of two years and one million Rupees

Pakistan's implementing statute for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species is the Pakistan Trade Control of Wild Fauna and Flora Act, 2012 (Act XIV of 2012), a slight instrument for the traffic it confronts. Section 3 prohibits the export, re-export or import of any specimen included in any Appendix of the Convention except under permit (the peregrine sits in Appendix I, the saker in Appendix II); yet the punishment under Section 3(5) is imprisonment of one to two years or a fine of between five hundred thousand and one million Rupees, and Section 10 exempts from Sections 3 to 9 altogether the transit or trans-shipment of specimens through Pakistan while they remain in Customs control. Since Pakistan is itself a transit country for the wildlife of other range states moving towards China and the Gulf, therefore an exemption for specimens in transit hence needs serious reconsideration.

The provincial statutes are lighter still. Under Section 21 of the Punjab Wildlife (Protection, Preservation, Conservation and Management) Act, 1974, as amended in 2007, the core offences attract imprisonment up to two years or a fine of between ten and fifteen thousand Rupees, the graver offences one to five years or between twenty and thirty thousand Rupees. The fine the magistrate may impose would not purchase one wing of the falcon before him.

The pangolin tells the same story. On 31st March 2014, Pakistan Customs seized 145 kilogrammes of pangolin scales from two Chinese nationals boarding a flight for Hong Kong at Benazir Bhutto International Airport, Islamabad, and the carriers were thereafter allowed to proceed abroad after fulfilling formalities (The Express Tribune, April 2014).

A Schedule that has never heard of the falcon

The Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2010 (Act VII of 2010) punishes the laundering of "proceeds of crime"; but "proceeds of crime" means property derived from a predicate offence, and a predicate offence is whatever the Schedule to the Act says it is. That Schedule, in the text published by the Financial Monitoring Unit ("FMU") as amended up to September 2020, in the middle of Pakistan's years on the FATF "Grey List" (June 2018 to 21st October 2022), lists some ninety-eight sections of the Pakistan Penal Code, 1860 and a long roll of special laws, among them the Customs Act, 1969 (Act IV of 1969) through Section 2(s) read with clauses 8 and 89 of Section 156(1), and even the Pakistan Environmental Protection Act, 1997 through its Sections 17 and 18. The Pakistan Trade Control of Wild Fauna and Flora Act, 2012 appears nowhere in it, and no provincial wildlife statute either; for the reasons best known to its drafters, the very offence which the FATF had asked every country to schedule was left off the list.

The FMU's Quarterly Report for October to December 2022 completes the picture: of the financial intelligence disseminated to law enforcement in that quarter, tax crimes accounted for ninety-nine items and Hawala and Hundi for eighty, smuggling and offences under the Customs Act, 1969 for sixteen and currency smuggling for four, and the predicate-offence table of that report includes the illegal wildlife trade nowhere. The FMU received 24,107 Suspicious Transaction Reports in 2022; on the published record, not one concerns the wildlife that leaves this country. The whole reporting machinery was rebuilt under the FATF's eye, and the falcon was never once mentioned.

The money, meanwhile, never enters the system the FMU watches. The Gulf buyer does not remit through a scheduled bank; the consideration settles in Dirhams through Hawala and Hundi, and the trapper in the north is paid in cash by a middleman whose name appears on no manifest. The Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2010 stands in field; but an Act which watches banks cannot see a settlement that never touches one, and a Schedule which does not name the offence can never generate the investigation.

Even where a prosecution is attempted, the laundering charge is derivative. In Shahid Chaudhry v The State (Criminal Petition No.174 of 2026, decided on 27th February 2026), the Honourable Supreme Court of Pakistan held that a charge of money laundering depends upon a determined predicate offence, and that "proceeds of crime" cannot be assumed before the predicate is established. Keeping in view that the wildlife offences are not scheduled at all, the sequence never begins: the trial court releases the birds, the appeal languishes, the specimens die in official keeping, and the financial inquiry is never opened because, in law, there is nothing to open it upon.

The houbara bustard is protected under the provincial wildlife laws, yet the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issues special hunting permits every winter to Gulf dignitaries; when the Honourable Supreme Court of Pakistan cancelled those permits and banned the hunt by its judgement of 19th August 2015, the federal and provincial governments sought review, pleading the place of the hunts in Pakistan's foreign relations, and on 22nd January 2016 the ban was lifted. The lawful houbara and the smuggled falcon travel to the same camps, the one under a permit signed by state functionaries, the other in a wooden box in an aircraft hold; in neither case has anyone followed the money.

What is to be done

In the light of the above, it is urgently required that, first, the Federal Government amend the Schedule to the Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2010 under Section 42 of that Act, which needs only a notification in the official Gazette, so as to include Section 3 of the Pakistan Trade Control of Wild Fauna and Flora Act, 2012 and the trafficking offences of the provincial wildlife statutes; secondly, that every wildlife seizure above a prescribed value trigger a parallel financial investigation by the Directorate General of Intelligence and Investigation-FBR with the FMU, so that the case is built against the financier and not only the courier; thirdly, that Parliament revisit the penalties of the 2012 Act and the transit exemption of Section 10; and fourthly, that prosecutors charge what is already available, because the export of a listed specimen without permit is prohibited by a law for the time being in force, its carriage out of Pakistan is therefore to "smuggle" within Section 2(s) of the Customs Act, 1969, and Section 2(s) read with Section 156(1) sits in the Schedule today. This writer has argued that route from the customs side for years, while the wildlife cases went, one after another, no further than the cage.

The FATF wrote in June 2020 that the most effective way to dismantle this trade is to follow its financial trails. Pakistan's record since is seventy-one dead falcons in the custody of the state, and not one published laundering investigation. The animals we seize die in our keeping; the money we never look for is alive abroad, and it is already paying for the next season's trapping.