The State Assets Recovery Unit (SARU) has hit a snag in recovering stolen state assets and is awaiting new legislation as well as reformed laws to comprehensively move to recover these assets.
Head of the Unit, Dr Clive Thomas told Stabroek News that his capacity is currently limited due to the lack of necessary legislation.
However, he said, moves are being made to formalise the agency’s structure and what it can do at this point in time. By the end of the year, he said, government is expected to formulate a State Assets Recovery law that is both morally and legally sound which will govern the protocol of the unit.
According to Thomas, the areas he is looking to have addressed rely heavily on the unit being legally empowered to freeze assets domestically and request foreign financial institutions to do so while investigations are ongoing into the propriety of questionable assets.
“What we want to do is to give an order to freeze those assets to conclude our investigation so based on that order we would ask the foreign jurisdictions to freeze the assets for us,” he said.
He noted that if the earnings and salary of an individual were known but the person was acquiring cash and assets that far outstrip the probability of their earnings, the unit can move in.
At that point, the individual could come forward and either “own up to it or try to negotiate a settlement,” the SARU head said.
As an example, Thomas related that for a person who held political office to have acquired multiple homes in the United States, their salary and earnings would have been known and such possibilities for property ownership would seem unlikely. He told Stabroek News that much like anti-money laundering legislation, state assets recovery legislation would not empower a judge to convict a person per se but instead to distinguish that there was cause for investigation and until that was completed, assets would remain frozen. Another level of prosecution according to Thomas, would be to report potential indiscretions to the Guyana Revenue Authority.
He said at that point, the unit could approach the tax authority and say “look we have discovered that this person has worked in Guyana for ‘x’ years, he has accumulated ‘y’ million dollars stashed in the bank accounts of the United States that we can get certified by the treasury and we don’t believe this was declared to you, was it?’ And the tax authority [will] say ‘no’ we then say ‘well we are reporting this as undisclosed income’.”
Thomas said that in this way, the state could at least recover 30% in taxes immediately.
He emphasised that Guyana needs legislation that would be on par with the rest of the world, “these agencies are vested with the power of law to make investigations credible.”
The SARU head related that while he will mainly concentrate on the recovery of assets from white collar crimes, the unit has three additional branches dealing with vehicles, lands and buildings and the misuse of public entities for private use.
Thomas told Stabroek News that another area that needs to be addressed is the formal relationship between SARU, the Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU) and the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) as there will be crossover of business.
