Former Attorney General Anil Nandlall says that while the Bank of Guyana assures that it is working to ease the public’s banking frustrations over anti-laundering laws, the red tape could continue for years as government still has not put required systems in place and financial institutions could be subject to penalties.
“The truth of the matter is that we are still behind and therefore, perhaps still subject to a regime of sanctions for not being fully compliant under the international AML/CFT regime,” Nandlall told Stabroek News.
“The problem is that we are not getting the truth from the Government. So, these problems that the ordinary citizenry are encountering when dealing with the banks may continue for another few years,” he added.
His response comes in light of a recent Stabroek News article that the Bank of Guyana is working with local banks to ease the red tape for pensioners and minors but in keeping with Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) laws.
This newspaper understands that a complaint by a parent about the New Building Society’s (NBS) procedures adds to many lodged from customers at banks across the country. Officials says that those complaints from parents and pensioners, make up a large percent of all customer grievances received about the hassles endured in small transactions at local banks across the country.
“The Bank of Guyana is working with banks to make it easier, to have some kind of standardized procedure to follow that would bring an ease to this but most importantly, in keeping with AML legislation and so on,” a source close to the process told Stabroek News.
The Bank of Guyana’s source said that the move followed complaints from pensioners and parents of minor savers of unnecessary hassle in conducting transactions.
The NBS recently replied to the article saying that it is prepared to work with regulators to not only simplify the process for pensioners and minor savers, but other account users as well.
“While we appreciate the additional effort some account holders face in gathering the documents requested we are prepared to work with the Regulators in simplifying the process as it relates to Pensioners and minors and even other account holders,” NBS said in a letter to this newspaper.
Nandall believes that the reasons ordinary Guyanese continue to experience great difficulties in their interactions with this country’s financial institutions are threefold.
“Under the AML/CFT legislative and administrative infrastructure, there is indeed a whole new menu of measures, which have been put in place that require from the ordinary citizens, a whole host of information, when these citizens need the services of financial institutions within the commercial sector. The most common of these institutions are our commercial banks and other lending agencies under the Financial Institutions Act. The matter is compounded by the fact that over the past three years, those who are in charge of incorporating into our legislative framework, recommendations emanating from the international regulatory bodies, have abysmally failed to filter these regulations and remove from them aspects that are unduly draconian and burdensome,” he posited.
“There is a failure to appreciate that what is promulgated in those recommendations are the maximum standard requirements. It is the duty of those who are charged with the responsibility of incorporating these recommendations, to distill them and remove therefrom, obligations which are too burdensome and unnecessary to be implemented, having regard to our local circumstances. They fail to modify these recommendations to make them smoothly adaptable to our local conditions,” he added.
Robotically
He said that in the end, government “robotically and mechanically incorporates, wholesale, the recommendations they receive” failing to contextualize and shape them to this country’s unique circumstances. “What we end up with in Guyana is a whole regime of the most exorbitant requirements,” he charged.
He added, “Had they gone through these recommendations one by one and examined the consequences they would have on our population and then negotiate to implement a less harsh version of those recommendations, we would have a friendlier framework under which our financial sector operates, while still being compliant with our international obligations.”
He blamed the APNU+AFC government for the new hassles this country’s citizenry endure at banks when carrying out transactions saying that it could have been avoided since 2014.
Nandlall, who was Attorney General under the Donald Ramotar PPP/C administration, explained, “When Guyana was labelled, internationally, a non-compliant jurisdiction because of APNU+AFC using their one-seat majority to vote down the requisite legislative amendments in the National Assembly, a regime of sanctions were internationally imposed on Guyana’s financial sector.
“The current Attorney General continues to proclaim that Guyana is now compliant because he was able to pass (of course with the PPP’s full support), the outstanding legislation. If this is so, then he has failed to ensure that the regime of sanctions that were imposed on Guyana’s financial sector, because of non-compliance, are removed because according to him, we are now compliant. What this simply means is that Guyana’s system continues to operate under some of the most burdensome punitive sanctions, which the ordinary Guyanese has to endure in their interactions with our banking system,” he added.
