From CFATF Grey-List to Global Gold Standard

You might remember that back in 2011, Belize was grey listed in the third Round Mutual Evaluation Report. This was a big blow, causing the country to lose eighty-seven percent of its correspondent banking relationships. Fast forward to today, and Belize has hit the gold standard in these reviews. McGann points out that this doesn’t mean the country is completely free of these criminal activities, but it does show that the mechanisms in place are highly effective in combating them.

 

Leni Ysaguirre-McGann, Director, F.I.U Belize

“Given how we performed in our previous assessment in the third round ten years ago where we did get publicly listed or grey listed by the CFATF and shortly following those listings we would have noted Belize experienced loss of correspondence banking up to eighty-seven percent of our domestic banking correspondence relationships were severed with various institutions and we felt the consequences and we know what that feels like. So, it was a priority for our national agents, the government, to avoid that happening again because the country did take a while to recover and reestablish relationships. So, there is certainly a dramatic turnaround from where we were in the third round up to now. The point of the assessment is to assess the implementation of measures and the reason why we have these measures is premise on the idea that countries will have scourge of money laundering, and the threats associated with that that it has to address. No country is perfect, and the objective of the assessment is not that money laundering, or these threats will be eliminated. It is to ensure that there are appropriate measures within jurisdictions to address them to provide for national and domestic coordination, international cooperation and coordination, to ensure you are prioritizing things like asset recovery and forfeiture, so those are the mechanisms that it focuses on. It focuses on having mechanisms to apply targeted financial sanctions which are measures we take against persons who may be listed because of their involvement in terrorism financing or proliferation financing. So it is to ensure that the appropriate mechanisms are in place to respond to threats.”