By Ravin Singh

THE National Assembly last evening passed contentious legislation against money laundering, but the opposition says it will be without teeth, given the absence of the Financial Intelligence Unit.
The Anti-Money Laundering/ Countering the Financing of Terrorism (Amendment) (AML/CFT) Bill went through all three stages of the parliamentary process at yesterday’s sitting of the House to be passed.It absorbs the final recommendation by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and paves the way for Guyana to apply to exit the FATF process.
The Bill was presented by Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Basil Williams, who highlighted Guyana’s obligation to becoming an AML/CFT compliant regime.
Having gone through a history of struggle in the House, between government and opposition, Williams noted that the APNU+AFC administration inherited a situation of “great reticence” to fight against money launderers and an even greater reluctance to counter the financing of terrorism.
The opposition’s Anil Nandlall, a former Attorney General, called for the Bill to be sent to a Special Select Committee for consideration and deliberation.

“We on this side will not sacrifice, we will not compromise, we will not ostracise the parliamentary process, the institutions of this House, through its various committees and resort to some office outside of parliament for consultation,” Nandlall said.
He then weighed in on the Bill, offering that it was “vulgar,” given the absence of a Financial Intelligent Unit (FIU) which is the supervisory body responsible for enforcement and monitoring of money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
Attorney General Williams said the former PPP government had continually failed to remedy the many deficiencies in the Action Plans it had agreed to with both the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force (CFATF) and FATF in or around 2011 and 2014 respectively.
During this time, Guyana was featured on three of four CFATF Public Statements, all of which identified Guyana as a jurisdiction with strategic AML/CFT deficiencies that had not made sufficient progress in addressing the deficiencies, or had not complied with its action plan developed with the CFATF to address the deficiencies.
However, the minister noted that despite this, Guyana has been making significant progress in addressing the action plan items; and as such, FATF, in all its publications regarding Guyana, commended the country for its efforts and encouraged Guyana to continue to implement its action plan.
To exit the CFATF follow-up process, Guyana has to satisfy these five core recommendations, the final one featured in this Bill. And with the third round of evaluation in process, the AG noted that it is important for Guyana to exit the process and be removed from the grey list now since the fourth round looms.
“We have shown the political will to implement the recommendations of these regimes. We will continue to try to save this country after all these years of neglect,” Williams said.
But the successful passage of the Bill was not only credited to work by the government, but stakeholders who had contributed during a two-phase consultation process. However, the opposition PPP had failed to attend these consultations and the opposition’s spokesperson on Legal Affairs Anil Nandlall sought to defend this in the House.
He explained that the party was made aware that consultations were being held to draft the amendment to include the outstanding recommendations by FATF. However, he told the House that he had requested of the person who sent the invitation to also send the recommendations so the party could be informed before attending the consultation. This, according to Nandlall, was done after the consultations, which explains the absence of the PPP.
The former AG noted that seven clauses, which are more than 80 percent of the Bill, confers responsibility on the FIU and on the director of that body, but both are non-existent. “The whole exercise will be in futility, because of the absence of the FIU,” he said.
But this was challenged by Williams, who told the National Assembly that Nandlall was speaking as if the director of the FIU will not be appointed within the next month or year.
“What we are proposing is a situation where we are preventing the Minister of Finance from employing and handpicking the director of the FIU. We’re giving them security of tenure by having the Parliament appoint them” the AG said.
Nandlall also highlighted that Section 68 (3) of the Bill stipulates that the court “shall immediately” grant a freezing order. Furious, he argued that what this basically does is usurp the powers of the judiciary to consider whether there is reasonable grounds to freeze a person’s assets.
“You cannot take functions of judiciary and give it to executive. You cannot mandate that a judge shall seize” he said.
But Williams rebutted this contention, noting that Nandlall’s reasoning is flawed, since there will be no directive to “seize” any assets given that this is not featured in the bill.
He added also that the government’s intention to present this Bill to FATF later this month will prove futile, since it was supposed to be at least eight weeks in advance for all participating countries to examine. “Which country will leave what they are doing at the last minute to look at this?” Nandlall questioned.
Nevertheless, the former AG reiterated his call for the Bill to be taken to the select committee, where he believes it will take only a week to be examined in its entirety. “It will only take about two weeks. Let us cleanse this bill of its impurity” Nandlall said.
Williams stressed however that there is no need to take the Bill to the select committee, since only “complex bills” are examined there, and this bill is not a complex one. He described this move by the PPP to take this Bill before the committee as a “delaying tactic.”
Thereafter, the AML/CFT Amendment Bill 2016 was read for the third time, after which the Committee of Supply approved the clauses and the Bill was passed.