WRONG AND STRONG

March 27, 2014, By KNews, Filed Under Features/Columnists, Peeping Tom, Source

APNU has told the people of Linden that the government is not interested in strong anti-money laundering legislation. It has also told the people of Linden that support for the anti-money laundering legislation should be preceded by the President assenting to Bills tabled and passed by the opposition in the National Assembly.

The people may or may not have responded in Linden to the claims by the Attorney General that for six months of last year while the parties were perusing the draft Bill, the opposition did not raise a single objection, and also that the opposition employed dilatory tactics as the deadline for passage of the Bill approached.

At a very late hour, APNU introduced amendments two of which are highly contentious and one of which APNU has since been forced to revise.

Neither APNU nor the AFC has disguised the fact that it is tying support for the passage of the Anti- Money Laundering and the Countering of Terrorism Bill to the President’s assent to certain opposition-tabled Bills passed in the National Assembly.

The amendments that it tabled to the draft Anti- Money Laundering and the Countering of the Financing of Terrorism Bill came at a very late hour. It provided an excuse for APNU to contend that it has problems with the draft law.

As a consequence of presenting these amendments, APNU can now hang its opposition to the draft law on two limbs. The first is the demand for presidential assent to opposition Bills. The second is that the draft Bill is not strong enough to ensure enforceability.

This latter contention is the new hymn that APNU is singing. It is accusing the government of not desiring strong legislation.

Now, the PNCR, which is the main party in APNU, has a history of boxing itself into a position from which it normally refuses to retreat even in the face of demonstrated reasons to do so. The PNCR is notorious for taking hard line stances and then when proven wrong or proven that its actions were ill-advised, refuses to back down.

Two notable examples were when they contended that the 1997 election results were flawed and the recent position they took in relation to the Minister of Home Affairs. Inquiries were held in relation to both issues, and the findings disputed the central contentions of the PNCR. Yet the party refused to back down and held to a “wrong and strong” attitude.

The AFC apparently has forgotten about this attitude of the PNCR when it jumped into bed with APNU over the Anti-Money Laundering and the Countering of the Financing of Terrorism Bill. The AFC has no problems with the Bill. The AFC however, wants the Public Procurement Commission established. And it has argued that this cannot be established without the support of APNU. Thus, it thoughtlessly pledged its support for the amendments proposed by APNU.

This was rather silly of the AFC to do this because you cannot pledge your support blindly. You have to consider carefully the position of the side to which you are pledging support.

APNU has since been forced to amend one of its amendments. And the new amendment is of such as to make the action it wished to address redundant. APNU was originally calling for customs officers and the police to be given powers to stop and search persons with currency in excess of two million Guyana dollars and for the currency to be detained.

By pledging its support to APNU, the AFC was in effect supporting this amendment which APNU was subsequently forced to revise in face of a public outcry.  APNU has now said that it will raise the limit to ten million dollars. This in effect is like asking that the speed limit be set at two hundred miles per hour. That would be tantamount to outlawing the crime of speeding. There is no vehicle in Guyana that will travel on the roadway at 200 miles per hour and therefore any law that sets this as the speed limit will in effect be making a speeding infarction redundant.

Similarly, raising the limit of cash that can be detained by the customs and the police to ten million dollars is like saying there should be now powers to search and detain persons with currency. There is no person that is going to be found carrying around ten million dollars in cash.

But despite the embarrassment and humiliation that APNU faced in having to revise the two million dollars limit, that grouping is not going to backpedal from its other amendments. It may have had to revise one amendment but you can bet that APNU will stick with the others like how ants stick to honey.

APNU has and will continue to argue that its other amendments, especially the ones that relate to the Financial Intelligence Unit is necessary to address the issue of enforcement which it says is weak at the moment and which needs to be strengthened.

At the heart of this argument about enforcement, however, lies a fundamental misunderstanding of what anti- money laundering laws are intended to achieve. This will be addressed in  tomorrow’s column.