THE Private Sector Commission (PSC) met with the Attorney General (AG) Basil Williams at his office on Thursday to discuss the Financial Institutions (Amendment) Bill 2015 which is currently before Parliament. The PSC delegation headed by Major General (Ret’d) Norman Mc Lean included the Immediate Past President Ramesh Persaud, Chairperson of the Legal Affairs Committee Attorney-at-Law Patricia Bacchus and Manniram Prashad. In a release last week, the PSC had called on government to ensure that the bill guarantees financial privacy.
In their statement following Thursday’s meeting, the business umbrella body said that during the discussions, the PSC indicated that they had no difficulty with the proposed amendments, but were interested in certain safeguards to protect data obtained by the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) which included notice to the customer, care and custody of the data as well as the specifying of reasons the data was being requested.
The AG who was accompanied by the Chief Parliamentary Counsel Mr. Cecil Dhurjon SC, CCH gave the PSC the assurance that their concerns would be examined and addressed. Government last month tabled the Bill which will be seeking to amend section 63 of the Act to permit disclosure of customer information by a financial institution to the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA), where a law so requires or where the Revenue Authority makes a lawful request or demand for the information. The Bill was read for the first time.
This amendment seeks to give teeth to the State Asset Recovery Unit that will look into the issue of State assets that have been siphoned off, both locally and abroad, by various people and bodies. Government plans to work with international agencies in order to establish international best practices. State Minister Joseph Harmon had noted that the Unit will be a multi-agency one, independent and free from political intervention. He alluded to the fact that eminent economist, Professor Clive Thomas, roughly calculated that some $300 billion were siphoned off per year, a figure that was upped to $500 billion by a major external financial body.