Bill proposes jail, $1M fine for money laundering

Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira presented anti-money laundering legislation in Parliament Wednesday that would give courts the authority to impose fines of up to $1 million and jail anyone convicted of such crimes.

The minister told the House of Representatives the bill aims to attack the root cause of crime and target white-collar criminals. "Who is laundering the money? Who is laundering the money? It cannot be the small man—it cannot be the small man. We all know that, so we have to be realistic about this fight on crime,” Tesheira said.

She said money laundering is sometimes forgotten "because it is dressed up so very nicely in a white shirt and a tie and looks so respectable and we sometimes forget those persons involved in organised crime are really the true criminals."

The bill is part of a package in the Government's fight against corruption, particularly white-collar crime. Nunez-Tesheira said the proposed amendments would put the country well on the way to making a dent in crime.

She insisted that the government's approach "is not a plaster for the sore but the antibiotic necessary to root out the scourge of money laundering which starts, not in the hills of Laventille but somewhere else, where there are persons with the means and ability to launder their money."

She suggested that the mayhem witnessed on the streets are just the symptoms of of the larger problem of crime in Trinidad and Tobago, noting that it is big money behind the guns and drug trade.

Tesheira said she was taken aback by police statistics showing that 2,500 young men have been murdered in gang-related crime in four years. “It speaks to the devastating impact of organised crime,” she said.

“We focus on those murders and communities which we call the ‘hot spots,’ and somehow we seem not to make the connection between what is symptomatic of an underlying cause and that the perpetrators are not located physically in those environments," the minister added.

Tesheira said in her view the money launderers seek a comfortable environment where they feel they would get a "soft landing", where they perceive law enforcement is weak and where they believe they could co-opt others in their criminal network.