Walrond underscores importance of enforcing Anti-Money Laundering laws, protecting Guyana’s financial system

Minister of Home Affairs Oneidge Walrond used a portion of her contribution to the national budget debates underscoring the importance of strongly enforcing anti-money laundering laws, a hit at US-sanctioned businessman-turn-Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed who has been indicted for related crimes.

“We will take financial crimes seriously,” emphasised the Home Affairs Minister on Friday.

“We will continue to enforce or anti-money laundering laws…this matters to us because Guyana is on a trajectory of important nation building. Our financial sector has to be protected and we will continue to protect it from crimes and proceeds of crimes, and anything that will derail the growth and trajectory of nation building that we are on,” she emphasised.

According to Home Affairs Minister, “if we have a weak, anti-money laundering enforcement, correspondent banking relationships suffer, international financial transactions become harder, investors face a higher compliance risk, the entire economy pays a price.”

In this regard, she emphasised that every person “must ensure that funds, assets and benefits they receive, can withstand legal scrutiny.”

Her comments come against the fact that the current Opposition Leader, Azruddin Mohamed is indicted by a grand jury in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida on 11 criminal charges ranging from wire fraud and mail fraud to money laundering, primarily connected to the export of gold to the US by his family’s company, Mohamed’s Enterprises.

Prior to the indictment, Mohamed and his father Nazar along with their companies were sanctioned by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for large-scale corruption, including gold smuggling, money laundering, and bribery, which involved avoiding over $50 million in taxes for the Guyanese Government.

Locally, the Mohameds faced charges for billions of dollars in tax evasion but these were withdrawn to facilitate their extradition to the US.

Meanwhile, the Home Affairs Minister also corrected several crime statistics presented by newcomer Toshana Famey-Corlette, who represents Mohamed’s party We Invest in Nationhood (WIN).

The new Member of Parliament (MP) criticised the government’s crime-fighting efforts, further claiming that not much is being done to address the issue of domestic violence.

But Walrond contended that this is untrue.

“We are in fact, experiencing in 2025, a decrease in the reports of domestic violence and increase in the proportion of convictions as it relates to the cases that we being reported,” she noted.

Additionally, she revealed that statistics show that serious crimes are down by 25.5% while the country’s recidivism rate is 14% – the lowest in the Caribbean.

Famey-Corlette, who identified herself as the shadow home affairs minister, also broadly criticised government’s spending in the security sector – but Minister Walrond, in turn, questioned her credibility to lecture on the topic.

In fact, Famey-Corlette contended that some of the funds budgeted for capital projects could be utilised for socially-impactful projects but Walrond rebutted, insinuating that the billions reportedly evaded by the Opposition Leader could be expended to expand existing social programmes.

Against this backdrop, Walrond expressed that “I often am baffled at the temerity of members of the opposition, especially from the WIN side, when they come around and act as crusaders of financial accountability.”