With Guyana no longer in danger of being on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) blacklist, Attorney General Basil Williams yesterday said that the focus now will be on securing money laundering convictions and he expressed the belief that training is necessary for all those who have a part to play in making this a reality.
Highlighting Guyana’s successful exit from the FATF/International Co-operation Review Group (ICRG) process, Williams expressed the view that there had been an omission that being training for judicial officers, prosecutors and money laundering investigators.
“It is my own view that… what should have happened is that the investigators under this regime should have been trained, prosecutors should have been trained, the magistrates should have been trained and the judges should have been trained because when you find somebody with US$500,000 or four or five bars of gold and you prosecute, you end up now without a conviction and having to return all of that and I mean obviously that person is having these things in breach of some law.”
He said he has made proposals to have such training done for judges and magistrates in particular. “For us to be effective under the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering of Financing of Terrorism regime we have to get more convictions for these offences,” he said.
Reading from a prepared statement, he called Guyana’s success, a collective victory.
He said the high level political commitment of President David Granger, the drive and the leadership by himself and his Compliance Team and the contribution of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) under the helm of Minister of Finance Winston Jordan were matched by the responsiveness of Guyanese financial institutions, the private sector and law enforcement institutions.
These institutions, he said, profoundly impressed the FATF/ICRG’s onsite team members with their knowledge of FATF’s standards to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. The common thread running through these bodies is the employee called the “Compliance Officer,” he said, who has emerged as the gladiator in the fight to secure Guyana’s adherence to the FATF requirements.
According to Williams, at the FATF Conference in Paris on October 18, Spain moved the motion to recommend that Guyana be removed from the Compliance Document. Spain’s motion was then supported by the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, France and Mexico, he said.
“It was because of such solid support, that the recommendation that Guyana exit the process was unanimously adopted by the FATF Plenary meeting, two days later,” he said adding that in both meetings he thanked these countries, the Americas Region Review Group (ARRG) assessors, the Caribbean FATF (CFATF) Secretariat and FATF/ICRG assessors for their support, on behalf of the President and Government of Guyana.
Guyana’s removal from the FATF’s Compliance Document, he said paves the way for a similar removal from the CFATF’s monitoring process, come next month.
“Guyana cannot be complacent as the fourth round mutual evaluation, beckons, where the test is whether we would have shown sufficient progress on effectiveness, e.g. having more convictions for offences of money laundering, terrorist financing and the purloining of state assets,” he said.
In response to queries about Guyana going after money launderers, Williams said this is a question for the FIU and the Special Organised Crime Unit.
“We have to start ensuring all of these legal framework and regulatory framework that we put in, in this third round… are effectively addressed in the fourth round so that by 2020 we must be able to show regular convictions for money laundering offences… Incidentally at the last FATF [meeting] it was highlighted that there is a third limb to the money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism …to combat the financing for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” he said, while adding that Guyana has to prepare and continuously do assessments.
