AG blames COVID-19 for anti-corruption delay

New corruption-fighting agencies are yet to get off the ground, the Attorney General acknowledged today, as he blamed the delay on the ongoing fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

But AG Dale Marshall said the groundwork has been laid and the funding identified to establish the watchdogs.

Marshall made this disclosure yesterday as he appeared in a virtual conference of the  Commonwealth Caribbean Associations of Integrity Commissioners & Anti-Corruption Bodies.

Marshall told the meeting Barbados had to divert all of its resources to keep the country afloat just when Government was on the cusp of establishing an Integrity in Public Life Commission.

He said:  “The resources that we would have made available to establish those agencies, to staff them independently and completely are now having to be diverted to ensure that we have ventilators [and that] those people who have been thrown on the unemployment line have food.

“Our current experiences are that we have had about 45,000 Barbadians applying to the National Insurance Scheme for unemployment benefits and our unemployment rate has now skyrocketed from just over ten to 30 per cent.

“We have put a lot of groundwork into putting a modern framework to fight corruption, determining that we need new agencies.

“[We] provided funding in our current estimates for the establishment of all of those agencies but now we are faced with a choice; do we focus on the bread and butter issues in keeping Barbados afloat, or, do we take some of those resources and dedicate them towards the fight against corruption.

“It is an impossible choice but that is the problem with being in government, we have to make impossible decisions.”

In addition to the fight against corruption, Marshall noted the issue of confronting money laundering.

He said that for every act of corruption, there will be an act of money laundering and he used the opportunity to remind the panel that Barbados had “made its way on to the European Union’s (EU) blacklist” in relation to its fight against money laundering.

He revealed to the Commonwealth meeting that the total volume of Barbados’ currency is about 0.000001 per cent of the total amount of cases that is moving throughout the world.

“Therefore, to be on a blacklist and to be considered a country that poses a great risk to the EU financial market is rather fanciful. But we still have to deal with how to get off the EU blacklist and we are not going to be able to get off unless we adequately address the issue of money laundering.

[In fact] any serious attempt to address the issue of money laundering must be completely married to how we deal with the fight against corruption,” he maintained.

The Attorney General gave the undertaking that Barbados would reorient its economy in such a way that transparency is at the centre since this is vital to rooting out corruption.

He also pledged to enact a modern and legislative framework to achieve the desired result.

Also on the panel at yesterday’s virtual conference were Commonwealth Secretary-General Baroness Patricia Scotland; Chief Technical Director of the Financial Investigations Division in Jamaica and Chairman and Independent Member of the Association Dirk Harrison; and Head of Public Sector Governance at the Commonwealth Secretariat Dr Roger Koranteng.