Final launder bill delayed by a day

Approval of the final version of the anti-money laundering bill will have to wait another day after the bicameral conference committee hit a snag on three contentious issues yesterday.

The Senate, which was expecting a bicameral report by 4 p.m. yesterday, suspended sessions until 10 a.m. today even as the bicameral panel tried to hammer out a final version of the measure in a bid to beat a weekend deadline to avoid threatened sanctions.

Senators and congressmen met behind closed doors at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas head office in Manila to reconcile their two versions of the bill.

Sen. Francis Pangilinan, a principal author of the Senate version, said the bicameral panel had difficulty

reconciling the differing provisions on covered transactions, predicate crimes and the freeze order on suspicious accounts.

Congress is racing to beat a Sunday deadline to pass the law or expose the country’s financial transactions to potentially disruptive sanctions by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member states.

An OECD body, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), has threatened to punish the Philippine government unless it rids the local banking system of its image as a haven for dirty money.

Senate President Franklin Drilon said he hoped a single version of the bill would be completed today to allow President Arroyo to sign it into law the same day.

The Senate passed its bill after midnight yesterday and House members had stayed up until the wee hours the previous night to pass their own version.

Mrs. Arroyo stressed yesterday that "what’s important is to have something done by Sept. 30" even if the proposed legislation was flawed.

Critics have charged that lawmakers had fashioned a watered-down version that would fail to meet FATF requirements. But the President said the two versions looked "all right."

"It fulfills the minimum requirements that the international banks are looking for," she said. "If it still needs to be improved... then the international banks will say ‘it needs to be improved, please amend it.’ But at least the sanctions will not be put into effect."

Both bills allow for the examination of bank accounts suspected of being proceeds of specified crimes. Present laws make it virtually impossible for regulators to look into bank accounts.

The main difference between the Senate and the House version is the list of suspected crimes that would trigger inspection of bank accounts.

The House version limits the scope of crimes to graft, kidnapping and drug trafficking, and for bank accounts containing deposits of at least P5 million.

The Senate version, however, also includes robbery, extortion, illegal gambling, piracy, smuggling, large-scale theft, swindling, cyber-crimes and terrorism and lowers the minimum deposit threshold to P3 million.

Meanwhile, Sen. Tessie Aquino-Oreta warned that the mere passage of an anti-money laundering law will not result in the immediate removal of the country from the FATF blacklist.

Oreta said a report on the FATF website revealed that eight countries and territories remained on the blacklist even after they passed anti-money laundering legislation in compliance with the watchdog’s requirements.

She said the Philippines has to hurdle six more requirements after passing the law to be stricken off the blacklist.

The absence of an anti-money laundering bill has prevented the government from cracking down on the hidden funds of terrorist groups linked to Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, the main suspect behind the terror attacks that killed thousands in the US on Sept. 11.

Late Thursday, the President said that once the bill was passed, she would hunt down the bank deposits of the Abu Sayyaf, the bandit group identified as having links with Bin Laden. — With Marichu Villanueva, Ding Cervantes