A Partnership for National Unity will not sacrifice scrutiny of government’s proposed amendments to the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Amendment Bill (AML/CFT) to meet a declared deadline.
In addition, party officials informed that government has never stated what sanctions were to be applied if the deadline was not met although APNU has repeatedly asked for clarity.
“We will not shirk our responsibility for careful scrutiny of the amendments to the legislation before the Special Select Committee on the altar of expediency,” said party executive Joseph Harmon, yesterday at a party press conference.
Government has been lamenting that the amendments needed to be met before a May 27 meeting of the Inter Governmental Financial Task Force or Guyana would face sanctions. However, it has not said what those sanctions are.
“From all of the documentation I have seen, it is not clear to me what these sanctions are. I have read all of the documentation provided to the Special Select Commit-tee… even listening to the presentation to the select committee by the Minister of Finance, it is still not clear what these sanctions are,” Harmon said.
He noted that on April 10 last the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force (CFATF) wrote to President Donald Ramotar reminding about the May 27 meeting and that all stakeholders responsible for the crafting and passing of the amendments be involved.
However, it was only on May 13, after the decision by the Parliament to send the amendments to a Special Select Committee, that the documentation needed to analyse the bill was received by the committee. “We wish to make it very clear that the background documents, which provided the reasons why there is need for the amendments to the legislation, were only downloaded to the members of the committee in an electronic format on Monday May 13,” he said.
As such, he said that reaching a concretised decision by next Parliament’s sitting seemed herculean. “I see it as a very tall order to get through consideration of the amendments within the timeframe,” he said.
“We will continue to work diligently, but are of the view that this is an emergency of the government’s own making. Therefore any failure to meet the deadline… lies squarely on the shoulders of the PPP/C administration,” he said.
“This was with them since 2011 and therefore if this was a piece of legislation with which they were enamoured; that they wanted to take action on they had a long time to do it. But it is our view the PPP has no major interest in getting this legislation through,” he added.
Further APNU feels that the urgency created by government is a trap to blame the opposition when the deadline is not met. Said Harmon, “… The entire conduct of the Attorney General in these meetings says y’all are going to pass this thing before the time or not? That is all he has been interested in. The PPP/C administration has no interest in passing this legislation.”
The amendments to the AML/CFT, once passed, will see an increase in the minimum fine upon conviction for certain money laundering offences from $1 million to $5 million; the insertion of a new section to provide for the freezing of funds of terrorists and terrorist groups or organisations and widening the scope of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to request information from telecoms providers.
The amendments also seek to expand due diligence obligations of reporting entities. One of the amendments would provide for reporting entities not to open new accounts or conduct business when they are unable to obtain satisfactory evidence of the identity of the intended customer and to consider making a suspicious transaction report. And, where a customer becomes “politically exposed”—either directly as a functionary of the government, state, judiciary, military, important political party, or indirectly as a family member or close associate of such a functionary—the senior management of a reporting entity would have to greenlight continued business relations.
However APNU wants the public to know that given the importance of the amendments its main concern is to make them work for this country and not just reach a deadline. “Our primary concern is to make sure that we have a piece of legislation that is in the interest of this nation not in the interest of expediency,” Harmon said.
