Mallalieu warns foreign rules may not suit Barbados

Senator Andrew Mallalieu has warned against automatically adopting overseas regulatory requirements, saying some international standards might not be appropriate for Barbados and urging the country to retain its sovereignty when implementing legislation.

He rose to debate the Virtual Asset Service Providers Bill, 2026 in the Upper House on Wednesday, questioning the removal of the 20 per cent threshold used to determine beneficial ownership and calling for a risk-based approach to regulation.

Mallalieu said Section 21 of the bill removed the previous threshold, changing the definition of a beneficial owner to someone who ultimately owned or controlled a legal person.

He argued that the change could mean that all owners, regardless of the size of their stake, would be covered.

“So even if you own one per cent or 0.1 per cent, you are now covered under this, and that is a substantial change in my reading,” he said.

The senator called on the Leader of Government Business to explain the reason for removing the threshold, noting that some of the requirements being introduced were coming from overseas.

He said Barbados needed to consider whether those requirements were appropriate for the local market rather than adopting them solely to comply with international standards.

“I do hope that it is a risk-based approach that we will take,” he said.

Mallalieu pointed to existing anti-money laundering and know-your-customer requirements for real estate agents as an example of where he believed Barbados had failed to take such an approach.

He said the role of real estate agents in Barbados differed from that in jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom and the United States, where agents could act as escrow agents and handle clients’ money.

“In Barbados, the regulations for real estate agents are completely different to other parts of the world where they do not act as intermediaries in the sense of escrow agents. They don’t ever touch the money,” he said.

He questioned the requirement for small real estate agencies to collect clients’ passport information, raising concerns about how the data would be secured.

“We have taken every small mom-and-pop real estate agent that we have out there in Barbados and asked them to collect passport data on clients. How do they secure that?” he asked.

Mallalieu said it was one thing to expect a large company to have systems in place to protect such information, but questioned whether the same could be assumed of every small business.

He also called for the country to maintain its sovereignty while ensuring that its regulatory approach was appropriate for local conditions.

(LG)