World Bank rep. to Govt…Share key money laundering risks data with public, private sectors

Apr 17, 2017 Peeping Tom

While Guyana has taken a significant step in completing its National Risk Assessment (NRA) so as to strengthen its anti-money laundering regime, one World Bank representative is urging Guyana to do even more.
According to Senior Financial Sector Specialist with the World Bank, Stuart Yikona, the Government should start the process of sharing key money laundering risks data with stakeholders in the public and private sectors so that they can take the necessary moves to protect themselves.
The official made this recommendation at the opening ceremony of the final workshop of Guyana’s first NRA which was facilitated at the Marriott Hotel.
Yikona noted that the NRA was a self-assessment that was led and conducted by the Guyanese officials in an effort to identify and assess the money laundering threats, risks and vulnerabilities of the system.

Senior Financial
Sector Specialist with the World Bank, Stuart Yikona

The World Bank official said that the NRA is just one simple part of the process of Guyana building a stronger Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) regime.
He said that the difficult part comes when the authorities will have to implement strategies for mitigating the risks and in some cases, reduce and/or even eliminate some of the threats and vulnerabilities Guyana faces from money laundering.
Significantly, Yikona asserted that Guyana should not wait until its next assessment in 2022 by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to adopt certain measures. He said that Guyana should make moves to implement some crucial steps to improve its standing.
He said one of the things required is the dissemination of the findings with the public and private sectors so they can understand the threats to Guyana and develop their own risk based approaches.
“That is something we believe that you can easily do by informing the public of what you have done. Another way is by deepening domestic cooperation; this means ensuring that there is not only collaboration between those in the public sector, but also those in public private partnerships in terms of dealing with the threats and vulnerabilities,” the World Bank official stated.
He said that in doing so, Guyana will be able to demonstrate how effective its system can be.
Yikona also stated that the Guyanese authorities can also decide how it wants to share the information it collected during the NRA.
He said that Government can decide to disseminate a summary of the findings, highlights or the entire document. The World Bank official stated that there are different approaches taken by different countries.

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