With Roger Khan expected to be deported from the United States to Guyana after serving almost 10 years in jail for drug trafficking, there is yet to be an indication that authorities here are trying to build a case against him for any crime that may have been committed on local soil.
Director of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) Matthew Langevine yesterday declined to say whether the unit is looking into Khan’s assets, while making it clear that it does not discuss matters specific to cases.
Efforts to contact Public Security Minister Khemraj Ramjattan were futile.
According to the FIU website, the unit is an autonomous body responsible for requesting, receiving, analysing and disseminating suspicious transaction reports and other information relating to money laundering, terrorist financing or the proceeds of crime. Prior to his arrest, Khan was said to have wealth, which included numerous properties.
Following the presentation of the FIU’s annual report to the Finance Minister Winston Jordan yesterday, Langevine was asked about Khan and he said, “I am unable to make any reference to that specific case.”
He explained that whenever transactions that involve suspected money laundering are brought to the unit’s attention, it will investigate and share the intelligence as is required with the relevant local and international law enforcement authorities. When pressed on whether Khan is one such case, he responded, “I can’t discuss that.”
When sentencing Khan in October, 2009, following his confession to drug trafficking, US Federal Judge Dora Irizarry had stated that following his prison term Khan would be placed on five years’ supervised release, but would more than likely be deported. She had warned him that if he re-entered the US illegally after deportation, he would be arrested and sentenced to a much longer prison term than 15 years.
In her comments during the sentencing, Judge Irizarry had stated that while no sentence imposed on Khan would make right whatever atrocities he had committed, the fact that he would serve time in a US prison meant that justice had been served. She had sentenced him to two terms of 15-years and one term of 10 years, all of which ran concurrently.
The sentencing marked the culmination of Khan’s case, which had riveted the country as explosive information linking the Guyana government to the once powerful and violent drug lord was revealed. Khan’s now convicted lawyer’s trial had been similarly revealing. Among other things, the revelations linked Health Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy to Khan and implicated him as being the government official authorising the importation of spy equipment found in a vehicle in which Khan and others were travelling. Ramsammy has repeatedly denied any links to Khan.
On Friday, this newspaper learned that the 47-year-old was being held in a Florida prison described as “A low security federal correctional institution with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp.”
