Armed with draft legislation, the State Assets Recovery Unit (SARU) will be meeting with the World Bank’s Stolen Assets Recovery Initiative (StAR) in mid-January to plot the way forward in transforming the unit into an agency with the authority to freeze assets and proceed with civil litigation alongside criminal investigations.
“What we are trying to do is build from scratch an organisation designed to prevent the stealing of public assets now, and in the future as well as to capture and return some of the property that was stolen in the past, the recent past. So we have a two-fold obligation. To do that we need to establish the capacity to make that pursuit and that means building up our strength in many different [ways] field, organisational, legally, personnel, resources-wise, contacts overseas and all that sort of thing…it is an evolving global structure of which we are part that we are trying to build a net,” SARU head Dr Clive Thomas told Stabroek News in an interview.
He emphasised that going forward, the unit needs to be a fully independent agency being propelled by