Barbados and Jamaica are among countries that have been removed from the European Union’s list of high-risk jurisdictions in the fight against international financial crimes.
The European Parliament on Wednesday delisted the two CARICOM Member States and several other countries. The European Commission had updated its list of jurisdictions last month. The list takes the legal form of a delegated regulation upon the imprimatur of the European Parliament.
“We have been actively advocating for such a decision. One which reflects the reality of the hard work we have undertaken to strengthen our financial systems. This is yet another demonstration of the strength of our partnership with the EU, a partnership I am committed to deepening even further as Chair of CARICOM,” Dr. the Most Hon. Andrew Holness, Prime Minister of Jamaica said on X (formerly Twitter) in response to the development.
At the closing press conference of the Forty-ninth Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of CARICOM on Tuesday, 8 July in Montego Bay, Jamaica, Prime Minister Holness had referred to the global architecture for money laundering and the slowness in the full materialisation of the decision of the European Commission.
He placed the Heads of Government Meetings in the context of working collectively towards the solution to challenges such as those related to the fulfilment of the commitments under the global financial architecture.
“Sometimes it’s very difficult for the public to relate with this exercise of bringing regional heads together because it all looks so officious and so way above every everybody’s grasp and understanding of the issues because the issues can often times seem so remote. It doesn’t seem as if it deals with the bread-and-butter issues. But take for example the bread-and-butter issue of being able to conduct banking transactions with ease and convenience.
“For the average person the overbearing regulations are a great frustration and they could easily conclude it is just the inefficiency of government why we have to fill out so many documents and provide so many forms of identification and answer so many questions to transfer $100, not understanding that there is a global architecture for anti-money laundering and other requirements imposed on states by various global entities and it affects not just Jamaica; it affects an entire Region. This is a problem that is right across the Region and therefore governments have to come together regionally to interface with these global bodies and lobby on your behalf so that the regulation requirements can be much more efficient and simpler for the average person to be able to interface with the financial system,” he said.
