The Tribune

By RICARDO WELLS

Tribune Staff Reporter

rwells@tribunemedia.net

THE stalled Non-Profit Organisations Bill 2018 is under no immediate pressure for passage, according to Attorney General Carl Bethel, who yesterday revealed the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) doesn’t call for a full implementation until September 2019.

“(This) bill is in line with our obligations and commitments to the FATF, not our obligations to the European Union (EU) and Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) which call for the December 31 deadline,” Mr Bethel clarified in an interview with The Tribune outside of Senate yesterday.

The government this week successfully passed a compendium of financial services industry bills to bolster its chances of avoiding a financial blacklisting.

The December 31 deadline was presented by the EU and OECD bodies to several countries as a date for full compliance to the multilateral convention on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) the government signed last year to sidestep blacklisting.

According to Mr Bethel, pictured right, the NPO Bill was initially only presented as a part of the EU/OECD slate, given the government’s focus on addressing all the “areas of concern” pointed out by various international financial agencies.

“As I said in my debate in the Senate on Monday, the NPO bill is not a BEPS bill. It is not a bill mandated by the European Union and the OECD for the purposes of substance or anything to do with the operations of the off-shore sector,” he said.

“It is a bill that is in line with our obligations and commitments to the Financial Action Task Force, in terms of monitoring of the financial sector for preventing money laundering, financing of terrorism, proliferation financing and any identified risk,” Mr Bethel added.

“There is no deadline on that, in fact, we have until September 2019 in terms of the overall review of the effectiveness of our anti-terrorism regime here in the Bahamas.

“So, there is no deadline or point this year where we must pass the bill, but we want to pass it early in the new year,” he contended.

When asked by The Tribune what the timeline means for public consultation surrounding the NPO Bill, Mr Bethel said he hopes to present Cabinet with a consensus on intended changes in the coming days and “if that should all be achieved, harmoniously,” move for passage in the Senate next Monday.

Civil Society Bahamas, a group of 300 non-profit and civil society groups, last weekend argued there were numerous sections in the bill “which raise significant concerns for the future health of the civil society sector.”

The consortium group warned many organisations will be unable to meet “the strict registration, accounting and record keeping demands” set out in the bill given that 40 percent of the industry is thought to operate on an annual budget of $25,000 or less.

The group also questioned whether the registrar of Non-Profit Organisations had the capacity to be converted from an information gatherer to a regulator, expressing fears that the legislation will exacerbate the current two-year wait for non-profit registration into “a significant backlog.”

On Monday, Mr Bethel delayed passage of the bill to allow for some consultation in the face of push back.