Anti-money laundering registry needed for non-financial businesses

Barbados needs an anti-money laundering (AML) registry for non-financial businesses and professionals, says Chief Compliance Officer Shari Squires.

On Friday, after a two-day AML conference hosted by the Compliance Unit at the Wyndham Grand Barbados Sam Lord’s Castle, Squires told Barbados TODAY the lack of a registry made it difficult to regulate operations in this sector and that could have a negative impact on the island’s mutual evaluation rating.

“The focus of this conference was on the designated non-financial business and professionals. In Barbados, that includes accountants, attorneys, real estate agents, and dealers in precious metals and stones,” she said.

“We thought it was important to have a conference like this with this focus because worldwide the ratings coming out of the mutual evaluations aren’t good for these sectors. So we wanted to have an outreach conference like this where we can share information with the individuals in these sectors so that they can get a better understanding of why we need to have them regulated in terms of anti-money laundering,” she said, pointing out that there was no AML registry for them to establish standardisation.

“For these sectors that we oversee, there’s no registration process in place. It is us going out there trying to find individuals who are doing these activities, who are buying and selling property and dealers for jewellery and precious stones. So what we are actually working on is to have legislation put in place for the registration process in terms of the AML supervision aspect of it.”

Squires said this registry was important so the Compliance Unit could monitor the practices of those in the sector and get an idea of the players and stakeholders.

“This registration will be important because we will know the true universe of those who are conducting these activities. We will know exactly how many real estate agents we have, and how many attorneys are dealing with the particular activities that we supervise because we don’t oversee everything that attorneys do. There are six [items] that are listed in our anti-money laundering legislation and only those activities we supervise. So we need to get an understanding so we can better supervise.”

The two-day conference was the first of its kind and Squires said she was pleased with the turnout and participants reported positively on the activities.