… along with a counter draft from Gov’t

Chief Parliamentary Counse, Cecil Durjohn on Wednesday afternoon submitted the A Partnership for National Unity’s two draft amendments to the Anti Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AMLCFT) Amendment Bill to the Parliamentary Select Committee, to which it was committed. According to Minister of Legal Affairs, and Attorney General Anil Nandlall, who is part of the committee, one set of the amendments captured the APNU proposal, and the other, the counter proposal from the Government side.
“We began to look at APNU proposal, but we didn’t get very far as the proposals are problematic, and to go through them to assess their impact on the bill itself  and the Principal Act proved to be a time consuming exercise,” Minister Nandlall stated.
“The APNU members themselves made several amendments to their own proposals and that vindicates government’s earlier view that those proposals were hurriedly put together, and their impact not properly examined,” he added.
“The Chief Parliamentary Counsel has tried his best to capture all the proposals and they are still making changes to this; now that they are seeing it for the first time, they are raising objections thus making it a circuitous exercise.”
Once the committee has completed the process of fully perusing the APNU draft amendments, Minister Nandlall said they would then have to examine the government’s counter proposal.
Minister Nandlall said the Administration still maintains that all this is unnecessary, since a CFATF compliant bill was already prepared and approved by the committee some two months ago, and can easily be enacted.
“The changes that are being made now are institutional changes to the very structure of the Principal Act, and even if we approve them, I believe it would be prudent to send them to CFATF for their imprimatur since they may run the risk of not meeting the approval of CFATF, thereby rendering the exercise in which we are engaged a futile one.”
The Select Committee is scheduled to meet again on March 25, 2014.