Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jan 15, 2014 News
– Treasurer
By Dwijendra Rooplall
Executive member and Treasurer of the Alliance for Change (AFC) Dominic Gaskin in a telephone interview with Kaieteur News expressed that the AFC position has not changed with respect to the party offering support for the passage of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) Bill.
AFC’s contention is that their support for the passage of the amendments is conditional upon the establishment of a Public Procurement Commission (PPC).
“Once they have agreed to establish the Public Procurement Commission, we will agree to support the amendments… That’s what we have been saying all along,” Gaskin said.
The AML Bill was last year voted down by the combined opposition with its one-seat majority in Parliament, because the Select Committee which was established to review the concerns of the opposition and stakeholders over the AML Bill was closed off by government and sent to Parliament unfinished. The consequences of which saw Guyana being blacklisted last year by the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force (CFATF) for being non-compliant with the recommendations put forward by the said body.
Attorney General Anil Nandlall had said that Guyana was given up to March this year (when CFATF will hold its next plenary meeting) to get its act together or face a higher level of blacklisting which will take years of reform and compliance to be taken off of.
As such, the defeated AML Bill was resent to the Parliamentary Select Committee where work on gaining consensus on the Bill started on Monday last.
Speaking on the Select Committee, Gaskin said that the AFC has no qualms about the amendments proposed by government over the AML Bill; their concerns are with the establishment of the PPC. He said that A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) “has amendments that they wish to propose and we will look at them. As long as they resolve in strengthening the apparatus to fight money laundering, we would be happy with them…Bearing in mind that this kind of legislation throughout the world is constantly updated and amended as new ways of laundering money come about. So it’s an ongoing thing; if it’s not sufficient this year there will be more amendments next year, so there will be tons of opportunities to amend the legislation.”
Gaskin said that with respect to the PPC, the government is holding a position that is not consistent with the Procurement Act. He explained that what the government would like to do is amend the act to retain a role in the process where they can review over $15M, and that award can only go ahead if government gives their no objection to it.
“We are saying that the act is very specific about that and it says that that role will come to an end when the Public Procurement Commission has been established. We are maintaining that that role come to an end.”
According to Gaskin, the AFC does not have a problem with government objecting to that award of the contract, but government must take the objections to the PPC, which is what that body was established to deal with.
“We don’t want the Cabinet…specifically at the end of the process where the award of a contract has been made…. that cabinet must have the role of looking over that contract and deciding whether or not they will support it, because that can lead to all sorts of corruption,” said Gaskin.
“Can you imagine a big contractor being approached by the PPP for a campaign donation knowing that he has a contract that has to be reviewed by Cabinet in a few weeks…is he going to say no?”
“Things like this play a major part in how democratic your country is governed, so cabinet must not have a role in the process… not a review role at that… bearing in mind that the government is involved in every step of the way. The procurement agency is usually a government ministry, they design the contract, they control the Tender Board and everything, so at the end of it all when it goes through that process, there is no reason for Cabinet to have this no-objection rule and it’s only there for one reason; only they want to control and intimidate the contractors.”
According to Gaskin, that is one of the reasons why the AFC decided to use the Anti-Money Laundering legislation as a “bargaining chip”
“More so in the light of the fact that this Bill was tabled at the last possible minute, and we knew that the government has been playing games with this bit of legislation and had been in breach of the recommendations of CFATF for a long time now, and were only hustling to cover up this by tabling the legislation two of three weeks before the meeting.”
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