F.I.U. Subjects Belize To National Risk Assessment For Money Laundering

Kent Clare

The FIU signed a memorandum of understanding with the Income Tax Department on Wednesday. As we told you, it is to facilitate the share of information across the two entities to fight anti-money laundering, tax evasion and terrorist financing. And under the new leadership of Kent Clare the FIU will be embarking on some big programs. On Wednesday, he told us about an extensive programme called the National Risk Assessment for Belize. He told us what it will entail and why it is necessary for Belize to develop this programme:

Kent Clare, Director, FIU

“The FIU is conducting a very ambitious but a very necessary program to develop what is called a National Risk Assessment for Belize. Basically what it is, it’s an anti-money laundering and terrorist financing initiative but it takes into account a wide variety of stakeholders, from the AG Ministry, Immigration Department, Customs, certainly Income Tax, the office of the supervisor of insurance, the IFSC who supervise the offshore sector, the Central Bank and basically you are looking at risk assessment and mitigation in every way that Belize could be challenged; whether it is our borders, risk from criminal activities – the street crime, cybercrime, and your fundamental money laundering, terrorist financing, protection of our financial systems and so on. We are required to ensure that this initiative is completed certainly in a time frame not more than two years.”