Bethel to meet with EU officials today

Attorney General Carl Bethel is scheduled to meet today with European Union (EU) officials to make a case for The Bahamas’ removal from the EU’s blacklist.

He revealed that fact as he asked for the Senate to meet an hour later than usual so that he could accommodate that meeting.

“I have a series of phone calls with European ministers of finance and other persons involved in order to address with each individual minister, starting tomorrow and continuing all of next week, to address and put forward the best case for The Bahamas for our removal from the European Union’s blacklist,” he said.

In October, the EU officially added The Bahamas to its list of countries categorized as having strategic deficiencies in its anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism frameworks.

Bethel said the meetings will give The Bahamas a chance to develop bilateral contact with major players across Europe who are less familiar with the country.

“And so that is an opportunity for us to establish person-to-person contact at the ministerial level but also…contact at the technical officers’ levels with individual countries in Europe that we don’t have that sort of close contact with at the present time,” he said.

“Just to make it clear, our officials have very close contact with countries such as France, where there is intense collaboration and cooperation going on right now. And we look forward to France having a very positive view of The Bahamas in short order, hopefully.

“We have very close contact with the UK. We are developing contacts with Italy, Spain and the major powers in Western Europe.

“So, this outreach is for a lot of the other ministerial countries where they have no familiarity with The Bahamas so we begin to forge direct bilateral contacts.”

In September, Bethel foreshadowed the blacklisting, noting that the matter was “beyond all of our control” given that the COVID-19 pandemic and associated travel restrictions prevented an onsite country assessment by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

That assessment is critical for The Bahamas’ removal from the FATF blacklist, upon which the EU blacklisting was based.

At the time, Bethel expressed hope that an onsite assessment by the FATF would be held in time for The Bahamas to get off the FATF blacklist at the earliest in February 2021.

The post Bethel to meet with EU officials today appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.

source https://thenassauguardian.com/bethel-to-meet-with-eu-officials-today/