The de­gree of com­pli­ance by lo­cal fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions to the an­ti mon­ey laun­der­ing re­quire­ments dif­fers from en­ti­ty to en­ti­ty, In­spec­tor of Fi­nan­cial In­sti­tu­tions, Carl Hi­ralal said yes­ter­day. Speak­ing at a news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day to launch the Cen­tral Bank's lat­est Fi­nan­cial Sta­bil­i­ty Re­port, Hi­ralal said he was sat­is­fied with the di­rec­tion of the mon­ey laun­der­ing ef­fort in T&T. "How­ev­er, what you would find is the de­gree of com­pli­ance with an­ti mon­ey laun­der­ing (pro­to­cols) dif­fers across the board. "What you would find is that the com­mer­cial bank­ing in­dus­try is far ahead of the oth­er sec­tors be­cause an­ti mon­ey laun­der­ing is more of an is­sue for banks than for the gen­er­al in­sur­ance in­dus­try and the bro­kers."

He said many of the lo­cal banks are sub­sidiaries of for­eign, par­tic­u­lar­ly Cana­di­an banks and many of the re­quire­ments and poli­cies that are in place in Cana­da are in place here. "But it would be less than can­did of me to say that all the com­pa­nies with­in all of the sec­tors are where they should be. There are dif­fer­ent de­grees in terms of im­ple­men­ta­tion," said Hi­ralal. The coun­try's top fi­nan­cial reg­u­la­tor said all of the com­pa­nies in T&T's fi­nan­cial sec­tor take their an­ti mon­ey laun­der­ing re­quire­ments se­ri­ous­ly and are mak­ing plans to fol­low the rules and to com­ply with the re­quire­ments. Hi­ralal al­so said that noth­ing has come to the at­ten­tion of the Cen­tral Bank that would in­di­cate that Re­pub­lic Bank has not com­plied with an­ti mon­ey laun­der­ing re­quire­ments. "We have no rea­son to doubt that our fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions are not tak­ing an­ti mon­ey laun­der­ing se­ri­ous­ly. "As a mat­ter of fact, be­fore we got the an­ti mon­ey laun­der­ing leg­is­la­tion in place, we is­sued an­ti mon­ey laun­der­ing guide­lines to the in­dus­try, which mir­rored the 40 plus 9 rec­om­men­da­tions. Hi­ralal said the Cen­tral Bank went ahead of the leg­is­la­tion and fi­nan­cial in­dus­try com­pa­nies were well on the way to im­ple­ment­ing many of the an­ti mon­ey laun­der­ing pro­to­cols by the time the leg­is­la­tion came in­to force.