Financial Crime World

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Financial Sanctions Enforcement in Trinidad and Tobago: A Mixed Bag

A recent report from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has assessed the effectiveness of Trinidad and Tobago’s efforts to enforce financial sanctions against money laundering and terrorist financing. The country received a mixed bag of ratings, with some areas showing significant improvement while others require further attention.

Effective Areas

According to the FATF report, Trinidad and Tobago demonstrated “largely compliant” ratings in several key areas:

  • Assessing risk and applying a risk-based approach (R.1)
  • National cooperation and coordination (R.2)
  • Money laundering offence (R.3)
  • Confiscation and provisional measures (R.4)
  • Terrorist financing offence (R.5)
  • Targeted financial sanctions related to terrorism and terrorist financing (R.6)
  • Targeted financial sanctions related to proliferation (R.7)

Areas Requiring Improvement

However, the country received “partially compliant” ratings in areas such as:

  • Customer due diligence (R.10)
  • Record keeping (R.11)
  • Politically exposed persons (R.12)
  • Correspondent banking (R.13)
  • Money or value transfer services (R.14)
  • New technologies (R.15)
  • Wire transfers (R.16)
  • DNFBPs: other measures (R.23)

Weaknesses and Challenges

In some areas, Trinidad and Tobago fell short of expectations:

  • Transparency and beneficial ownership of legal persons (R.24) and legal arrangements (R.25)
  • Regulation and supervision of DNFBPs (R.28)
  • Financial intelligence units (R.29)

Strengths and Recommendations

Despite these challenges, the FATF report highlighted several strengths in Trinidad and Tobago’s financial sanctions enforcement regime:

  • Commitment to implementing technical requirements
  • Efforts to address weaknesses in areas such as customer due diligence and record keeping

The country has been urged to continue to improve its compliance with international standards and best practices in order to effectively prevent and combat money laundering and terrorist financing.