The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business

Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

OFFICIALS from the Registrar General’s Department (RGD) will travel to the Cayman Islands next week to “finalise the migration of data” to a new online portal as efforts to digitise its companies section ramp up.

Jomo Campbell, minister of state for legal affairs, addressing the opening of the new legal year said work to digitise the Registrar General’s Department is an ongoing process. “The Registrar General’s Department is currently digitising the corporate registry with BRAC Informatics Centre (BIC), an international service provider of digital services based in the Cayman Islands,” he confirmed.

“The Registrar General’s Department, in fact, travels to the Cayman Islands next week to meet with BIC to finalize the migration of data from the current systems at the Registrar General’s Department to a brand new companies portal that will be more user friendly, where persons will be able to utilise various services provided by the Registrar General’s Department at the touch of a button.”

Mr Campbell also hailed The Bahamas’ achievement of perfect compliance with the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) 40 anti-money laundering and counter-terror financing recommendations, and the country’s de-listing from the European Union’s (EU) money laundering blacklist.

Referring specifically to the FATF process, he added: “In November 2022, an expert evaluation process, which began in May, culminated with the approval of The Bahamas’ fifth follow-up report.

“Three plenary meetings, ongoing communications and discussions from May 2022 to December of the same year resulted in the assessors’ recommendations to upgrade The Bahamas’ compliance for the final two recommendations; those being recommendation 18 as it relates to NPOs (non-profit organisations), and 15 as it relates to new technologies, from partial compliance ratings with to compliant ratings.”

Mr Campbell continued: “The Caribbean Financial Action Task Force (CFATF) plenary approved the follow-up report, and sent it out to the FATF global network of quality and consistency review.

“In late December 2022, the CFATF assessors’ recommendations was sanctioned by the FATF global network of members. The Bahamas’s fifth follow-up report was released on December 22, 2022, by the CFATF. The Bahamas’s fifth follow-up report documents the analysis of The Bahamas’ progress in addressing the technical compliance deficiencies identified in the published 2017 mutual evaluation report and revisions of the FATF recommendations.

“We are proud to announce that we as a country have now attained technical compliance ratings of ‘compliant’ and ‘largely compliant’ in all 40 FATF recommendations as they relate to international anti-money laundering, counter terrorism finance and proliferation standards. With this The Bahamas becomes only the second jurisdiction in the Caribbean and wider Americas to attain this ranking, and the sixth in the FATF global network.”