Last week’s column carried a brief description of the current situation of Guyana in regard to the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force (CFATF). The next column (and the remainder of this series) will be devoted to addressing the way forward, in light of the present impasse in regard to the proposed new anti-money laundering legislation and Guyana’s broader relations with CFATF. However, this week’s column seeks to provide readers first with a broad appreciation of the scale and extent of money laundering at the international level in order to reveal the highly significant threat this phenomenon poses to the functionality of the modern state and operations of the global economy.
Threats to the modern state
While the threats posed by the financing of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction are in a sense, vividly self-evident, it is therefore important that readers do not as a consequence of this result underestimate the systemic threats, which the growth of money laundering poses