Anti-Money Laundering legislation… Continued outcry about looming sanctions is scare-mongering

May 18, 2014 News

– AFC’s Gaskin

By Dwijendra Rooplall

Treasurer and Executive Member of the Alliance for Change (AFC) Dominic Gaskin is contending that the continued talk and outcry about impending sanctions over the non-passage of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AMLCFT) legislation is politically motivated and aimed at driving fear into the populace to get the Bill fast-tracked.
Gaskin explained that the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force (CFATF) is the body that has to refer Guyana to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and if it decides to do that then the FATF will have to take a decision on what it wants to do.

AFC Executive
Dominic Gaskin

The FATF is expected to meet in June and if Guyana is has not shown improvement then it will be reviewed for international blacklisting.
“Having reviewed our case, the FATF would then issue a public statement citing Guyana as being non-compliant and urge its members to take counter-measures and protect their jurisdiction, which generally means that their banks will have different regulations, and depending on what their regulations are, they will have certain counter-measures. Usually it will take the form of an enhanced due diligence process, where more information will be required.”
“From my research, and this is my contention all along, there is nothing like sanctions where countries will stop doing business with Guyana. We are primarily an importer country where we buy stuff from people; we are not exporting a lot. People are not going to refuse our business; they are not going to refuse our money… that is not going to happen.”
He said that if it takes an extra day for the payments to go through or if questions are asked and more information has to be supplied, that is quite likely going to be the case, but in terms of our business community and the transactions that they would normally do, it is highly unlikely that any supplier would stop business because of a blacklisting.
“Most of those suppliers don’t even know that the CFATF exists, it is the banks…the banks have certain obligations under their regulations and they have to report suspicious transactions… and they have to exercise certain precautions when dealing with banks in jurisdictions that have been blacklisted.”
Speaking to the concerns raised that because of Guyana’s blacklisting by the CFATF, the foreign exchange rate has increased and will continue to do so exponentially, Gaskin asserted that “our currency has devalued over the last year and that devaluation has more to do with our balance of payments, it has nothing to do with the Anti-Money Laundering Legislation. We have had fairly stable exchange rates for the last 20 years or so, but last year could have had to do with the fall of gold prices. During last year our currency slipped and I think that created a shortage of foreign currency and made it a little difficult.”
He also addressed the concerns of remittances being affected when he said that “a lot of times if you try to process a wire transfer and the banks tell you that you have to wait an extra day or they can’t do it, the reason is that they didn’t have sufficient foreign currency; it is not because Guyana is being blacklisted.”
Gaskin said that people are sending money in and out of Guyana that he knows of and it is going through.
“I do wire transfers fairly regularly and I don’t see any slowdown in the system, except where foreign currency was not available and we were told we have to wait until tomorrow or until there is enough foreign currency.”
According to Gaskin, Guyana has been always considered a high risk country “so if you are coming to Guyana with a credit card and you try to do a credit card transaction in Guyana, sometimes that transaction won’t go through. You would have to place a call to the bank and the bank would say well, ‘yes we blocked it because Guyana is a high risk country’ and that has been going on for a number of years, it has nothing to do with this AMLCFT legislation. We can pass that legislation tomorrow and we would still be considered a high risk country.”
“For some reason, and I think its political, some people want the Guyanese public to believe that Guyana will face sanctions and Guyana will be punished and people will stop doing business with us and all of that. They want to make our people as nervous as possible and they are looking for all sorts of reasons to tie it to the passage of the anti-money laundering legislation, but any delays in wire transfers over the last year or so have more to do with the lack of foreign currency than with any kind of sanction.”
“I am not saying that we should not pass the legislation, I think it is very important that we put the Anti-Money Laundering legislation in place. I think it’s pretty urgent, but the fact is we should not be threatened, harassed and basically told a pack of lies in order to get the legislation approved,” Gaskin stressed.
He explained that countering money laundering and the whole purpose of the legislation and the setting up of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) is to investigate and to prosecute and secure convictions and probably seize assets and the proceeds of financial crimes.
“We have had legislation in place since 2000 and this recent one in 2009… we have had only one conviction and that was a case where the UK government had done most of the investigation. There is no interest on the part of this government to deal with problem of money laundering,” said Gaskin.