Guyana President Accuses Rich Countries Of “Double Standards”

Is this a pretense for Guyana joining Venezuela's Bank of the South?

What President Jagdeo's motivation for bringing this up, if in fact the US doesn't actually enforce the standards that it pushes on other countries?

Hardbeatnews

GEORGETOWN, Guyana
Weds. Nov. 14, 2007:

http://www.hardbeatnews.com/editor/RTE/my_documents/my_files/details.asp?newsid=14095&title=Top%20Stories

Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo says countries like the US, United Kingdom and Luxembourg have "tremendous double standards" when it comes to money laundering.

Jagdeo made the accusation as he addressed delegates at the 34th Annual General Meeting and Conference of the Association of Caribbean Indigenous Banks in Guyana yesterday.

The Guyanese President claimed that while the US State Department's annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Reports continues to identify a number of Caribbean countries as money-laundering havens, the US itself is not on any blacklist.

"That's where the financial transactions have their origin and the payment starts," Jagdeo claimed, adding that a lot of "hot money" was circulating in London from tax-evasion originating in the UK.
He added that while major Western nations are failing to combat money laundering in their own jurisdictions they continue to press the Caribbean to enact a wide range of laws and regulations.

But he told delegates, "We should make sure that we don't have a movement of illegal money across our jurisdictions, but we must not legislate ourselves out of competitiveness and we must not put burden on our banking system that other countries don't have."

The Caribbean Association of Indigenous Banks, Inc., is a community of locally incorporated/owned banks and other financial institutions in the Caribbean/CARICOM region, which provides opportunities for discussion on issues impacting the indigenous banking/financial services community as well as for the sharing of experiences and networking. The conference wraps up tomorrow in Guyana. – Hardbeatnews.com