– Govt completes committee’s work without opposition
– Country granted new deadline, November 18
By Svetlana Marshall
Government next week will be making its submission to the National Assembly on the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (Amendment) Bill despite the lack of support by the opposition.
Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon said owing to the delaying tactics employed by the opposition, the governing side moved to complete the work of the parliamentary special select committee reviewing the bill Tuesday night.
Opposition support
According to Dr Luncheon, within days, the report will be presented to the National Assembly and the amended bill will be read in the House for a third time. But the lingering question is; will the opposition support the bill’s passage?
“I don’t know if God will descend and put sanity in the heads of our parliamentary colleagues. But we have an obligation to this nation to pursue an enactment to avert those dire consequences,” the Head of the Presidential Secretariat said.
The amended bill was read in the National Assembly for the first time on April 22, and subsequently on May 7 when the opposition voted for it to be sent to a special select committee.
Dr Luncheon said although Guyana has already been blacklisted in the draft Caribbean Financial Action Task Force (CFATF) report and faces the risk of a financial crisis, if the A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) continues to delay the process of considering the amended clauses of the bill.
He cited Tuesday as an example, when the opposition failed to show up for a scheduled meeting. But according to Dr Luncheon, APNU’s delaying tactics started before the Parliament went into recess.
“The parliamentary opposition conspired at the end of the session, just before the beginning of the parliamentary recess 2013, to delay the conclusion of the parliamentary special select committee on its consideration of the bill. It was clearly at that stage, ripe for its final consideration …,” Dr Luncheon explained.
Turning his attention to the Alliance For Change (AFC), he said the party’s decision to support the amended bill only if the Public Procurement Commission (PPC) is established is unacceptable. “The AFC, they are even more ridiculous, this linkage between the enactment of the anti-money laundering amendment bill and the establishment of the Public Procurement Commission is touted as the AFC’s ultimate position.
“Heaven forbids in consideration of the non-enactment of the amended anti-money laundering bill, one would have to ask, what has adversely affected us by the non-establishment of the Public Procurement Commission,” Dr Luncheon said.
In May, the AFC withdrew its support for the bill, noting that the PPC must be established first.
Anti-money laundering
Dr Luncheon said the parties are operating as though the (amendment) bill is not a product of Guyana’s obligation to the CFATF.
He explained that the amendment to the original bill came about as a consequence of the multilateral evaluation report filed by CFATF. The Cabinet secretary said the opposition should not hold the country at ransom.
While the ruling party is contending that the work of the committee has been completed, Opposition Leader David Granger said this was not the case, noting that the opposition has not received a formal notification that the work of the select committee was completed.
He said committee chairperson Gail Teixeira was advised that the opposition would not have been able to attend the meeting owing to the staging of its statutory shadow cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
Stakeholders
Granger maintains that the opposition is still conducting interviews with stakeholders on the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU).
According to the APNU, the unit has received major criticism since its establishment approximately four years ago.
On May 27, Guyana missed the CFATF’s deadline and if blacklisted by FATF countries as a result of its failure to meet the new November 18 deadline, financial transactions involving Guyanese companies will be intensely scrutinised, creating significant delays in the financial and banking systems.
