Ky­ron Reg­is

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi be­lieves T&T may soon be re­moved from the Fi­nan­cial Ac­tion Task Force (FATF) black­list. In his ad­dress at an NEM An­ti-Mon­ey Laun­der­ing and Counter Fi­nanc­ing Ter­ror­ism Con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Al-Rawi said: “I look for­ward to com­ing home from Paris on the 21st, 22nd of Feb­ru­ary, Car­ni­val Sat­ur­day or Sun­day, while the jump­ing up is go­ing on, to ask peo­ple hope­ful­ly to jump a lit­tle high­er, be­cause we may have a great tale to tell.”

T&T and 15 oth­er coun­tries were black­list­ed by the FATF be­cause it was not com­pli­ant with An­ti-Mon­ey Laun­der­ing and Coun­ter­ing the Fi­nanc­ing of Ter­ror­ism (AML/CFT) codes.

The AG, ac­com­pa­nied by Wen­dell Lu­cas of the Fi­nan­cial In­ves­ti­ga­tions Bu­reau, Asst DPP Joan Hon­ore-Paul, and An­ti-Ter­ror­ism Head in the AG’s of­fice Vyana Shar­ma will go be­fore the FATF in Paris from Feb­ru­ary 13.

“Put quite sim­ply, we don’t have the lux­u­ry of con­sid­er­ing our sov­er­eign­ty as the be-all and end-all,” Al-Rawi said. “We can be en­tire­ly sov­er­eign and tell the rest of the world we will do as we wish, but that has a con­se­quence, the con­se­quence is glob­al iso­la­tion, and in ef­fect sanc­tion that crip­ples our econ­o­my.”

He said be­ing pub­lished on any list is a con­no­ta­tion that will “hit” the coun­try and as a re­sult “we end up with now the well-known con­cepts of de­risk­ing and de­bunk­ing.”

Ac­cord­ing to the AG, that is what hap­pens when coun­tries ef­fec­tive­ly say “that it is too ex­pen­sive to do busi­ness with you.” He said coun­tries shy away from do­ing busi­ness with na­tion-states that are non-com­pli­ant with the in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dard be­cause of a lack of struc­ture.

He said T&T’s in­abil­i­ty to be pre­pared to un­der­go its eval­u­a­tion five years ago re­sult­ed in its lack of suc­cess.

“Trinidad and To­ba­go, in fail­ing its Jan­u­ary 2015 as­sess­ment, en­tered in­to that en­ter­prise en­tire­ly un­pre­pared,” he said.

“For some rea­son, God alone knows why, our gov­ern­ment then said to the world, ‘Aye there’s this new thing called a fourth-round as­sess­ment, we’ll be the first in the world.’ And we didn’t fin­ish the third round as­sess­ment, so for­get that, we’ll just jump in­to the fourth round as­sess­ment.”

Sub­se­quent­ly, the coun­try was placed un­der su­per­vi­sion and pub­lished on the list, which is ei­ther a grey list or black­list. He ex­plained that the ini­tial list is “ma­nip­u­lat­ed de­pend­ing on how coun­tries view you be­cause they take note of it and de­cide to put in their own sanc­tions.”

The AG be­lieves that T&T can demon­strate the hard work it has done to be re­moved from be­ing black­list­ed. He en­cour­aged cit­i­zens to ap­pre­ci­ate, based on fact, the work that has gone in­to trans­form­ing the coun­try’s leg­isla­tive struc­ture.

He said: “Pre­tenders at the door sell­ing bad news need to be re­ject­ed on the demon­stra­tion of facts.”