sufficient to prevent most types of financial crime. in the us, notwithstanding the most updated legislation and the most efficient regulation, madoff and stanford happened. international experience, as well as experience here at home, suggests that strengthening corporate governance is critical to combating financial crime. a corporate environment in which there is an effective system of controls and where management is accountable to their boards and boards accountable to their shareholders is one in which financial fraud and other financial crimes will be less likely to flourish. good corporate governance serves as an early warning system to corporate and financial abuse. the fact that many of our firms are not listed, and are private or family partnerships does not remove the need for good governance. every financial institution operating in trinidad and tobago will extol the virtues of good governance, even when their actual operations may indicate otherwise. it is time that good governance ceases to be the background noise and becomes the main music. checks and balances are needed to rein in excesses, including financial crime and these controls must be exercised at all levels, at the level of the board, the management and very importantly, at the level of the external auditor. a few words about money laundering … i fully agree with the important focus it has been given in this forum because i am convinced that we, in trinidad and tobago, need to take our anti - money laundering efforts up several notches. the reality is that as the advanced countries tighten their anti - money laundering regimes, criminals could be expected to target small countries like ours, which have less - robust defenses. to our credit, we have embarked on a comprehensive program to upgrade our financial infrastructure in general and our anti - money laundering regime in particular. we have a new financial institutions act ; we are close to introducing new legislation for the insurance and the credit union sectors and we have brought in money remitters under the central bank ’ s purview. in the last few months, we have brought our aml / cft regime closer in line with international requirements. our immediate challenge is to ensure that there is effective enforcement of the existing measures and to broaden the regulatory perimeter for aml / cft to non - financial businesses and professions such as lawyers, accountants and real estate agencies. you are going to hear all you need to know about financial crime and anti - money laundering during the course of this very impressively - designed forum. make full use of the knowledge that you will acquire and on your return to your work - place share what

ewart s williams : governance, regulation and financial crime prevention opening remarks by mr ewart s williams, governor of the central bank of trinidad and tobago, at the 2010 regional forum “ governance, regulation and financial crime prevention ”, port - of - spain, 9 august 2010. * * * i would like to thank the sponsors, the international governance and risk institute for inviting me to provide some opening remarks to what should be a most stimulating forum, given the impressive array of presenters. your seminar theme is about “ financial crime prevention ” and while many of your sessions would be on money laundering and terrorist financing, i am pleased to see that the forum will cover other areas of financial crime. i would like to make some brief comments on some aspects of corporate financial crime which appear to be on the increase in trinidad and tobago. i will also say something about anti - money laundering efforts here in trinidad and tobago. for convenience, financial crime is defined to cover any non - violent crime resulting in financial loss. this definition will easily cover fraud on the public, credit card fraud, improper self - dealing, stock market manipulation and other breaches of fiduciary trust. money laundering is clearly an important category of financial crime. obviously, i will look at the issue from my vantage point as regulator. the recent massive destruction of financial wealth in the us and europe ( most notably enron and worldcom but there were others ) raised the profile of corporate financial crime. in the last two years or so, we have been introduced by madoff and stanford. what all of these have in common is a breach of fiduciary trust whereby depositors or investors were bilked of considerable sums by unscrupulous operators who were reckless with other peoples ’ money, driven by greed and self - dealing. in recent years, we in the caribbean have had our own high profile examples of financial crime, of various levels of sophistication. some of you may remember the “ fantasy tours ” a pyramid scheme which collected more than tt $ 100 million in a year before its inevitable collapse. a similar scheme in jamaica, plus, is estimated to have raked in between us $ 100 - 500 million. there was one in grenada reported to have cost investors an estimated us $ 30 million. it is worth noting that both in trinidad and tobago and jamaica, it was not only the lowerincome or the financially naive that were caught in the net. in fact, several people, who considered themselves