Guyana praised for anti-money laundering measures -Williams

-FATF says work remains to be done

Guyana has managed to fully implement five of the eight recommendations made by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in relation to anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT), Attorney General Basil Williams said yesterday.

The other three recommendations have been partially implemented.

The five recommendations implemented are criminalizing money laundering and financing of terrorism; confiscation and provisional measures; financial institutions secrecy laws; reporting of suspicious transactions and the provision for the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU).

Basil Williams
Basil Williams

Guyana had made some progress in customer due diligence and beneficial ownership; targeted financial sanctions relating to terrorist and terrorist financing and the AML/ CTF supervisory regime recommendations.

FATF, in a statement, said that more work remains to be done and urged Guyana to continue to implement its action plan, including by ensuring and implementing an adequate legal framework for identifying, tracing and freezing terrorist assets; ensuring a fully operational and effectively functioning financial intelligence unit; establishing effective measures for customer due diligence and enhancing financial transparency; and implementing an adequate supervisory framework.

Williams recently returned from a FATF meeting held in Paris where discussions on Guyana’s progress were held.

Reading from a prepared statement, Williams said that government came in for “high praise” from FATF, the International Coordinating Review Group (ICRG) and the FATF Plenary at the meeting.

He said that the ICRG adopted the Assessors’ report of its regional arm, the Americas Region Review Group (ARRG) which stated that the main development in Guyana is the enactment of the AML/CTF Amendment Act 2015 which became enforceable on July 10, 2015.

According to Williams, the ARRG’s report concluded that “Guyana has demonstrated its commitment to comply with the action plan and is to be commended for having met most of the deadlines.” He said that at the FATF Plenary, the meeting adopted this statement in its report stating that “the ICRG noted the progress Guyana made in enacting legislation to improve its AML/CFT regime but recommends that Guyana maintains its status quo in the compliance document.”

Williams said that the compliance document is FATF’s process of an ongoing review of compliance with the AML/CFT standards incorporated in an action plan agreed to by FATF and countries like Guyana identified as having strategic deficiencies. He said that the three colour schemes in this classification are light grey, grey and dark grey.

The FATF public statement, Williams informed, is the other category whose colour classification is black. “Blacklisted countries are jurisdictions

subject to a FATF call on its members and other jurisdictions to apply countermeasures to protect the international financial system from the ongoing and substantial money laundering and terrorist financing risk emanating from the jurisdiction,” he said.

Williams informed that FATF sets a premium on the sincerity of high level commitments given by governments and their political will to implement its measures.

“From the outset of this administration President David Granger wrote the president of FATF assuring him of the new government’s commitment to remedying the deficiencies identified and implementing its recommendations,” he told reporters.

Further, he said, both the ICRG and Plenary Meetings noted that his presence was ample testimony to the government’s commitment to expediting its obligations to the FATF process. “From the foregoing, it is clear that Guyana under an APNU+AFC government is light years away from being blacklisted,” he stressed.

Subsequently, in responding to a question asked, Williams said that comments made by the PPP/C about Guyana going to be blacklisted was nothing more than a “hoax.”

He denied that there is heightened scrutiny of financial transactions coming out of Guyana. “What I am saying to you is no, that is not so…the PPP came and frightened the nation with all kinds of things that would happen to us but when I went there, I am not seeing those things,” he said.