Former Finance Minister Carl Greenidge has sounded an alarm over the country’s apparent shortage of the skills needed for the effective functioning of the recently established Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU).
“The unit has specific and unconventional tasks to perform, tasks which require skills in which we are short. The belief that they can be short circuited is ill-conceived,” Greenidge wrote in a letter published in the Sunday Stabroek, in which he criticised the ruling People’s Progressive Party/Civic government for not doing sufficient groundwork to set up the unit.
“The work assigned to this unit is neither normal police work nor soldiering. The fight against money laundering is simple as a concept. It involves people who make money in a variety of ways including the drug trade getting their money into the banking system as normal deposits so that they may spend it when and where they like without hindrance from the authorities, police, regulatory agencies or banks. Apprehending them requires policing which includes preventing the illegal activities which generate the money in the first instance,” he noted.
Greenidge, who is the shadow Finance Minister for main opposition APNU, pointed out that investigating money laundering required special investigative skills. Money laundering, he noted, involves trying to hide money that originates outside of the financial system, such as from drugs, in the banking system or finding a means of parking it somewhere. Unearthing such transactions usually requires importing a range of “new skills” in the police force and innovative approaches, according to him and he said that the SOCU would need to have specialists with a reasonable capacity in several disciplines. He added that the unit’s need for such skills will be more acute in the absence of specialist financial investigative units elsewhere in the country and capacity within the commercial financial entities themselves.
“The SOCU has not been established to deal with financial crimes per se, but those involving the hiding of money which is the distinctive feature of money laundering. For that reason and the absence of complementary financial units and capacity in the police and Bank of Guyana, for example, the SOCU we should be seeking to build an [Serious Fraud Office] or SFU-plus,” he said.
He added that the financial institutions with which the SOCU will be working will need to conduct their own investigative and due diligence work, the results of which will need to go the FIU for referral to the relevant body outside of the police.
However, Greenidge argued that contrary to the impression given recently, the SOCU should not have to await reports emanating from the FIU or the commercial banks to conduct its work. “It should independently be looking at business activities that harbour money laundering and mapping the characteristics of those businesses. It should be looking at the types of behaviour identified by the SFO, the CFATF and FATF guidelines and related bodies to get information on movements of cash, drugs and tax dodging. That information may be gleaned directly. Without exercising its own initiative the national pursuit of money laundering crimes will be severely and unnecessarily hamstrung,” he said.
It is in this context he urged a “more nuanced understanding” of the anti-money Laundering efforts and urged the government “to recruit and train persons with the aptitudes, relevant education, formal qualifications and basic skills that are relevant to the job.”
“This has not always been the approach of the PPP,” he observed, while adding that it needed to be stressed that the establishment of SOCU does not remove the need for the Guyana Police Force (GPF) to recruit skilled persons, competent in the key financial and accounting areas identified globally.
Greenidge pointed out that after three or more years of existence, the FIU, which stands at the centre of the fight against money laundering, has registered “no significant achievement” or even a credible report, prosecution or evidence of intensive special training in the area of forensic financial audits. “If the SOCU is led and funded in the same manner it will equally become another white elephant,” he warned, while adding that there has been no attempt on the part of the government to explain what relevant skills the appointee to head the SOCU brings to the fight.
Fmr Lt Col Sydney James was recently appointed to head the unit and he said that it will function under the guidance of intelligence provided by the FIU.
Greenidge said it appeared that the PPP believes that the public would recognise that intelligence work in the army post-2000 is relevant background for a SOCU head but noted that while this may be, it is “certainly not sufficient.”
“This is not about finding a tough guy who will follow instructions. Worse yet the sloth in providing for supporting staff and office facilities is to be deplored. This is a serious matter and if not done properly we will find ourselves going through the same nonsense every year in relation to blacklisting – for lack of legislation, lack of regulations and non-prosecution,” Greenidge warned. Asked about Greenidge’s criticism yesterday, Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee said, “The man is at sea in a ship without a rudder.”
Opposition leader David Granger had recently told Stabroek News that a unit such as the SOCU has always been necessary because it will deal largely with white collar crimes and, particularly, money laundering and other crimes involving fraud.
“Obviously it is a unit that requires persons who have training in handling accounts and other financial instruments. It is not an ordinary policing unit. It has to be a specialised unit because organised crime requires special knowledge and it also requires the ability to cope with the transnational aspect…,” he said.
Granger said that he has not been able to see the structure of the new unit and does not know what is involved. “It would call for moving policing at a much higher level than is existing at present and I just hope that the people who are recruited into that unit are properly trained to do so,” he, however, stressed. “It doesn’t have to be independent of the police force but the training, the recruitment of personnel need to be [of] a different level…,” he added.
Besides money laundering crimes, the unit will be prosecuting persons suspected of terrorism and financial offences. The government has faced criticism for the delay in its establishment. Recently, Guyana and the UK signed a deal for the training and mentoring of the unit’s staff.
