Tearing down the laundromat

Last Tuesday, the Philippine STAR headlined the rejection by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) of the watered-down anti-money laundering bill that our senators tried to foist off on a half-comprehending public. The paper carried a photo of the task force dignitaries who had come all the way to Manila to appeal to our legislators.

Such flattery must have drawn the haughty approval of the Senate’s more commodious egos, who later that week reportedly agreed to make concessions that FATF could live with.

Will the new deal stick? Maybe, maybe not. The Philippines after all was given all the way up to March 15 to comply. And if there’s anything we can count on many of our fearless leaders to do, it’s their instinct to wait until the very last moment before they have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into doing the right thing.

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But why all the fuss, one might ask. Why should we care about such an arcane dispute?

For an answer, just look at the other big photo on the STAR’s front page that day, featuring the scowling, unshaven aspect of one Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. This is a face that I wager your average man on the street would prefer to see at the end of a rope, or stuck atop a stake, or being ground under the cloven hoof of His Infernal Highness.

For over a decade, this man plotted wholesale slaughters, rising to the third-highest position in what is probably a collective anti-Christ, the al-Qaeda. Do you remember the photos of those people jumping from the top floors of the World Trade Center after those planes crashed into it two years ago? Even earlier, do you recall the TV coverage of those mangled and naked bodies strewn inside the LRT car after that Rizal Day bombing?

My own memory is of a smiling, clean-shaven young reporter for the Wall Street Journal named Daniel Pearl. Sometime last year he was lured into an interview somewhere inside Pakistan, kidnapped, and then one of his hooded captors slit Daniel’s throat in front of a video camera. Subsequently this captor proceeded to hack off the rest of Daniel’s head, again before the camera.

Even back then, the identity of the executioner was suspected to be Khalid. Now it’s one thing to order massacres from a distance; you can’t really smell the blood from afar. It’s quite another to personally take another man’s head in your hand and saw a knife all the way through his neck. It takes a special kind of evil to do that.

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It was this man, Khalid, who played a key role in directing the global flow of funds that nourished al-Qaeda in its various lairs and warrens. It was the unimpeded movement of money he orchestrated that allowed al-Qaeda to hatch, then to carry out all manner of monstrous plots against innocents the world over, whatever their race, age, sex, or religion.

It is men like Khalid whom we’d be inviting to sample the hospitality of our banking system if our deal with FATF falls apart. It is organizations like al-Qaeda whom we’d encourage to set up shop inside our borders if we offer them a haven for their money that they can find almost nowhere else.

It is incidents like the LRT bombing and the aborted assassination of the Holy Father and, now, the recent carnage in Davao that we may unwittingly underwrite if our senators are suddenly stricken with qualms about due process when it comes to the sanctity of bank accounts.

The privacy of one’s funds is pretty important, true, but by no means can it be held up as the highest and best good at all times. Unconditionalities can be expensive if lives are at stake.

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But suppose certain of our legislators remain unimpressed. The al-Qaeda threat seems so far away, after all. Khalid is already behind bars, after all.

And it’s not like we were a banana republic with a money-crazed president who quite possibly consorted with narco-smugglers and who most certainly opened all sorts of bank accounts under fictitious names that were later, very helpfully, sheltered under due process by a majority of his senate–right?

Since something like that could never happen here – heaven forbid! – any remaining hold-outs in the Senate might instead be persuaded by this position paper that’s been making the rounds of the Internet.

Its authorship is pretty eclectic–a gaggle of OFW professional and welfare organizations, various NGOs, stalwarts of the business community like BAP, MAP, FINEX, ECOP, PCCI, and so on. If their arguments fail to impress, their credentials certainly should.

And what do these assorted worthies have to say about the consequences of failing to comply with international standards of anti-money laundering legislation?

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One: By refusing to comply, we fall woefully out of step with the rest of the civilized world. We put ourselves in the dubious company of less than a dozen outliers, the likes of Guatemala, Myanmar, and the Ukraine. Remember the old saying: You’re marked by the company you keep.

Two: We put at risk some $7-8 billion of OFW remittances a year. There is just no way all of this volume can be transported outside of the banking system. At a minimum, we prevent the banks from aggregating individual small remittances into larger transactions. This imposes a substantial cost of inefficiency that we’ll end up having to pay for later.

Three: We also put at risk the availability and efficiency of financing for our external trade. Exports alone contribute $35 billion a year to our economy and support hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Four: We burden the foreign operations and relationships of our local banks, impairing their ability to process remittances, finance trade, and intermediate investment.

Five: We may even discourage non-financial foreign investments, if the principals behind them are scared off by the precautionary pronouncements of the FATF.

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Bottom line? We would end up signaling the international business community that we’re not yet ready to play with the big boys. We’d be announcing through our actions–no matter how flowery our rhetoric–that we’re not yet prepared to pay the price of admission, one that’s reckoned in terms of accountability, transparency, and a willingness to abide by the rules of the game.

In the best case, we end up marginalized from an increasingly interdependent global community. In the worst case, we become a magnet for the Khalids of the world. The consequences of these unappetizing choices are too grim to even contemplate.

So let’s make sure, between now and March 15th, that the deal reportedly struck between our senators and the FATF finds its way into new law. We deserve no less from those who presume to lead us.