Barbados and Cayman Islands also remain on grey list

Durrant Pate/Contributor

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has retained Jamaica on its Grey List, citing strategic deficiencies in the island’s countering of money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation financing.

The decision came from the report on the FATF’s most recent Paris meeting last month, which also retained Barbados and The Cayman Islands on the grey list of countries being closely monitored for money laundering and terrorist financing.

The FATF, which is a Paris-based intergovernmental organisation founded by the G-7 group to develop policies to combat global money laundering and terrorist financing, expressed concern that Jamaica failed to complete its action plan, which fully expired in January 2022.

The FATF strongly urged Jamaica “to swiftly demonstrate significant progress in completing its action plan by the February 2023 deadline or the FATF will consider next steps if there is insufficient progress”.

Fixing Jamaica’s strategic deficiencies would mean:

· Including all financial institutions and designated non-financial businesses and professions in the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing regime and ensuring adequate, risk-based supervision in all sectors.

·  Taking appropriate measures to prevent legal persons and arrangements from being misused for criminal purposes, and ensuring that accurate and up-to-date basic and beneficial ownership information is available on a timely basis to competent authorities.

·  Implementing a risk-based approach for supervision of the non-profit organisations sector to prevent abuse for terrorist financing purposes.

Strongest warning for Jamaica

While FATF had the strongest warnings for Jamaica, the organisation classified the three Caribbean islands among those jurisdictions under increased monitoring, actively working with FATF to address strategic deficiencies in their regimes to counter money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing.

The FATF has told Barbados that all of its deadlines to fix deficiencies have expired and it should “swiftly” complete an action plan to address strategic deficiencies by February 2023. Specifically, FATF urged Barbados to:

·  Take appropriate measures to prevent legal persons and arrangements from being misused for criminal purposes, and ensuring that accurate and up-to-date basic and beneficial ownership information is available on a timely basis.

·  Demonstrate that money laundering investigations and prosecutions are in line with the country’s risk profile.

·  Further pursue confiscation in money laundering cases, including by repatriating or sharing confiscated assets with other countries.

Cayman also given February deadline

In the case of The Cayman Islands, they were similarly given a February 2023 deadline to resolve outstanding issues identified by FATF for remedial action. Specifically, Cayman has been told to demonstrate they are prosecuting all types of money laundering cases in line with the jurisdiction’s risk profile and that such prosecutions are resulting in the application of dissuasive, effective, and proportionate sanctions.

The FATF publishes a black list as a benchmark for international sanctions, listing as targets countries found to be non-cooperative in the global fight against money laundering and terrorist financing.

The grey list serves as a warning for countries to be compliant to the directions, at the expense of being blacklisted.