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Latvia over the past two years prioritized sanctions implementation, due-diligence upgrades, asset freezes and money laundering investigations to avoid being branded as high risk for financial crimes, the director of the country's financial intelligence unit, or FIU, said. On Feb. 21, the Financial Action Task Force voted to keep Latvia off a so-called "gray list" of jurisdictions, 18 months after Moneyval, the intergovernmental group's representative in Europe, concluded in a damning report that most aspects of the country's anti-money laundering and counterterrorist financing framework did not meet global standards. Those findings drew Latvia into FATF's secretive International Cooperation Review Group,...