And in other news, today the media asked the prime minister about the new NGO-NPO bill. You've heard complaints from non-governmental and non-profit organizations about not being consulted before the bill reached the House.
Today, the PM said that the bill was pushed ahead in response to pressure from the international community, but confirmed that he's willing to meet with the NGO and NPO's to hear their concerns.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"The issue with the NGO bill is that things that are being forced upon us by the international community when it comes to the issue of money laundering and anti-terrorism and that kind of stuff but we have no control over it and the NGO makes that very straight forward. All we're saying is that you just need to give an account of where you get your money from just to report it to the FIU so then the international community, they can see we are doing our part. We can't take any risk when it comes to the issue of the corresponding banking situation, we lost about 80% of the corresponding banking relationships that we had earlier, probably 10 years ago, so the ones that we have, we have to do everything possible to keep and so the financial action task force from the Caribbean will be making a new review of our work, by the end of December, they will be here in June to see how far we are and these are some of the obligations that they have imposed on us. We're just asking them to cooperate with us, it has nothing to do with the government, that we want to control anything to do with them, it's simply that the international community is saying, everybody needs to account for the monies they are getting, where it is coming from, and so forth so but we'll meet with them and hear them out and if we can make any changes to make it better- but at the same time meet the standard that is being asked of us, we're prepared to do it."
