Jefferson Clarke

 

Finally, Trinidad and Tobago has enacted legislation that will pave the way for a legally constituted Financial Intelligence Unit to be established.

Although Trinidad and Tobago can boast of having one of the Region's oldest FIUs, a unit which has been in operation since April of 1997, the absence of legislation, to formalise the activities of that unit, was a major cause for concern by T&T’s 3^rd round assessors, resulting in the jurisdiction being rated as NC with Recommendation 26.  

It took a marathon session, which ended late last night, in the Senate, for all the members present to agree on the functions, powers and structure, with which the creature of this new Act will be endowed.

Along the way, many of the senators broached the bane of CFATF law enforcement examiners by raising the issue of the autonomy of the FIU, in circumstances where the bill had proposed that the Minister of Finance be the line minister for reporting functions. The fear here, was that of political interference, in the operational autonomy of the FIU. One senator even proposed that the FIU be placed under the purview of the Chief Justice.

With the passage of this Act, it is unclear what will become of the existing FIU. What is clear however is the fact that the coercive nature that it adopted is now a thing of the past because the new FIU will be purely administrative in nature.  

Interestingly, the provisions proposed in the bill were in no way inconsistent with provisions already enshrined in FIU legislation throughout the Region. One has to consider however whether the AML successes of the FIUs which are already backed by such provisions, are such that any jurisdiction enacting FIU legislation for the first time, can justify using these laws as the model upon which it builds its own FIU infrastructure.

This leads me to parrot the comments of one Senator who opined that in her view, the bill “lacked innovation�. I will just like to add that T&T’s 4^th round Mutual Evaluation will be quite interesting.