BARBADOS — Chairwoman of the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, Maxine Waters (D-CA), on Wednesday, April 20, joined Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley to co-host a Caribbean Financial Access Roundtable at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Center in Barbados.
In a report on its website, the U.S. Embassy in Barbados said the full-day roundtable “focused on concrete proposals to tackle the challenges that small island states face due to the continued reduction of the availability of trade and financial services for their economies and people.”
In addition to Prime Minister Mottley, several CARICOM Heads of Government participated as did the CARICOM and OECS Secretaries-General. Senior representatives of U.S., Canadian, and Caribbean financial institutions also contributed as did industry experts from the Caribbean and the U.S.
Prime Minister Mottley opened the engagement with a welcome to the six-member Congressional Delegation led by Chairwoman Waters.
She said, “We believe that we live in the same neighborhood. We are friends. We are family, and we have a vested interest in making this the best neighborhood possible for all of our citizens, and we recognize your commitment.”
Prime Minister Mottley added, “We are unflinching in our support for international efforts to stop crime, to stop terrorism, and to stop their financing.”
In her remarks, Congresswoman Waters said, “I am indeed committed to fostering greater inclusion within the financial services sector, and as Chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee of the United States House of Representatives, my committee has prioritized promoting financial access to traditionally marginalized and underbanked communities in the United States and abroad. For the Caribbean especially, this has long been a personal mission. Simply put, the Caribbean – its people and its culture – matter. The islands of the Caribbean are among America’s closest neighbors. We do tourism together, we do trade together, we secure the hemisphere together, and we’re family – both as a regional community and through the Caribbean diaspora in the United States.”
She added, “We must work together to find ways to increase financial connections including correspondent banking services to and from the Caribbean.”
The international conference follows Chairwoman Waters’ previous high-level in-person CARICOM engagement on financial access and banking de-risking issues in November 2019, and highlights the importance of the U.S. relationship with the Caribbean and its diaspora, which has influential impact on American culture and economy with over 8 million people in the U.S.
Congresswoman Waters was joined in Barbados by Financial Services Committee members Joyce Beatty (D-OH), Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), Ed Perlmutter (D-CO), and other members of the United States House of Representatives Troy Carter (D-LA) and Stacy Plaskett (D-VI).
In a Barbados Government Information Services release on theCaribbean Financial Access Roundtable, Prime Minister Mottley said Caribbean countries are “unflinching” in their support for international efforts to stop crime and terrorism, as well as the financing of them.
“We are unflinching in our support for efforts internationally to stop terrorism, to stop crime, [and] to stop the financing of both of them,” Prime Minister Mottley said. “And that has made us unpopular among those who believe that money laundering and know-your-customer rules are backward and repressive.”
She added, “But the current régime, we believe, of anti-money laundering and countering financing of terrorism is so transparently flawed, that it is likely to end up being counterproductive, inadvertently…supporting crime and the sponsorship of financing for crime.”
The Prime Minister underscored the importance the Caribbean Financial Access Roundtable, which included discussions on de-risking and correspondent banking, saying they had started in 2019. She proffered the view that a greater investigation into this matter was required.
“It may well be too, Madam Chair, that you may well even feel that it is necessary to have Congressional hearings on these matters,” Prime Minister Mottley said. “And I can assure you that if you do go in that direction, that all of us here would be prepared to participate, as well as other representatives in the region, because this strikes at the very heart of our ability to keep our countries and our economies safe.”
She added, “The solution to this conundrum for small developing countries is that the international process of fighting money laundering be more focussed on money laundering itself. An example of this would be for us to demand that no country can be placed on anti-money laundering sanctions’ lists, unless there is also actual evidence of the material money laundering.”
Ms. Mottley argued that to simply sanction a country on the basis of a list because officials wanted them to do better, would be to have a disproportionate consequence on the country, without evidence of there being money laundering.
She noted that the countries that were routinely on the anti-money laundering lists had very little international finances.
“The rich countries develop and drive the lists. Those countries do not appear on the lists and criminals can see and follow who do not appear on the list. And it doesn’t take a Solomon to know which and where is the path of easiest resistance,” she said.
The Prime Minister listed a number of countries where money laundering transactions were routed, yet, she added, there were no reports of them being sanctioned or facing enhanced due diligence. She stressed, however, that the sanctioned countries did not have the capacity to impact international finance.
