Richard Lord

?Gov­ern­ment se­cured pas­sage of leg­is­la­tion to es­tab­lish a Fi­nan­cial In­tel­li­gence Unit (FIU) of T&T late yes­ter­day.

One of the ma­jor pro­vi­sions of the bill, which was pre­sent­ed by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Karen Tesheira, is to es­tab­lish a unit with­in the Fi­nance Min­istry with the pri­ma­ry re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for en­sur­ing T&T's com­pli­ance with cer­tain in­ter­na­tion­al rec­om­men­da­tions on ter­ror­ist fi­nanc­ing.

T&T would have been black­list­ed if the leg­is­la­tion was not ap­proved with­in the next few days. The bill was passed with sev­er­al amend­ments. The Op­po­si­tion ab­stained, claim­ing that it re­quired a two/thirds vote but all 26 gov­ern­ment MPs vot­ed for it en­sur­ing that it got the three/fifths ma­jor­i­ty vote, which At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie said it re­quired.