The Amer­i­can Cham­ber of Com­merce of T&T (AM­CHAM T&T) says it wel­comes news by the Min­istry of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and Le­gal Af­fairs' (AGLA) that the Fi­nan­cial Ac­tion Task Force (FATF) has re­moved T&T from its grey list and con­clud­ed that the coun­try was no longer sub­ject to ac­tive mon­i­tor­ing,

In a re­lease Sat­ur­day, the busi­ness or­gan­i­sa­tion said "Al­though we main­tain that there was no need for our coun­try to ever end up on the “grey list,” we take this op­por­tu­ni­ty to con­grat­u­late the Gov­ern­ment and, the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al’s Of­fice in par­tic­u­lar, for spear­head­ing and im­ple­ment­ing the reg­u­la­to­ry and leg­isla­tive mea­sures re­quired to achieve this mile­stone.

"As the largest econ­o­my in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean with the strongest fi­nan­cial sec­tor, we must en­sure that our reg­u­la­to­ry en­vi­ron­ment is ef­fi­cient, mod­ern and ro­bust.

"The mea­sures tak­en to get en­hance our FATF com­pli­ance are a sig­nif­i­cant step in this di­rec­tion. We note al­so that this an­nounce­ment comes less than two weeks af­ter the full procla­ma­tion of the Fair Trad­ing Act (FTA)."

The cham­ber added that the com­ing in­to force of the FTA was an­oth­er ex­treme­ly pos­i­tive step to en­hanc­ing the reg­u­la­to­ry en­vi­ron­ment by pro­vid­ing a more ro­bust frame­work for fair com­pe­ti­tion and there­fore for new, some­times small­er en­trants equal ac­cess to the mar­ket.

The busi­ness group said it had in the past lament­ed the lack of alacrity in the pas­sage leg­is­la­tion to en­hance ef­fi­cien­cy in the coun­try.

The cham­ber said while there was more to be done, it would like to ex­tend ku­dos to the Gov­ern­ment in these two in­stances.

The busi­ness group said it looked for­ward to the pas­sage of the Tax In­for­ma­tion Ex­change Bills with­in the next week since both Gov­ern­ment and Op­po­si­tion had sig­nalled their in­tent to sup­port.

The cham­ber said this leg­is­la­tion was crit­i­cal to hav­ing the coun­try re­moved from the EU list of non-co-op­er­a­tive tax ju­ris­dic­tions and there­fore safe­guard the abil­i­ty of the lo­cal bank­ing sys­tem to con­duct in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness.

The or­gan­i­sa­tion said it will al­so al­low in­di­vid­ual com­pa­nies to more ef­fec­tive­ly do busi­ness in T&T by re­duc­ing the cost and ad­min­is­tra­tive bur­dens of do­ing busi­ness in the coun­try, there­by in­creas­ing its at­trac­tive­ness if done in tan­dem with oth­er mea­sures to im­prove the ease of do­ing busi­ness.

The cham­ber is al­so look­ing for­ward to the ma­te­ri­al­i­sa­tion of the Gov­ern­ment’s com­mit­ment to pass the Pub­lic Pro­cure­ment Leg­is­la­tion be­fore the end of March 2020; the lay­ing of the Bev­er­age Con­tain­er Bill and the in­tro­duc­tion of leg­is­la­tion to op­er­a­tionalise the T&T Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty, that were both re­flec­tive of the con­cerns of all stake­hold­ers.

See Page 14