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On Friday when Prime Minister Dean Barrow announced that the Financial Intelligence Unit would no longer be pursuing close to 200 money laundering charges against the Belize Bank and First Caribbean International Bank, he simply said that the concession was made to give the banking system some comfort. But this morning when the PM called into the Krem WUB morning show, he made it clear that this is about more than comfort, it’s a matter of operational necessity.

The Prime Minister said that the Governor of the Central Bank had received a call from a senior executive at the Bank of New York warning that if the money laundering prosecution persists, his group may be forced to review their correspondent bank relationship with the Belize Bank. That would put the Belize Bank’s operations in Belize in some jeopardy because the correspondent bank is the one that accepts the deposits of its respondent bank and the relationship is critical to the stability of the respondent – in this case, the Belize Bank.