Most suspicious FIU reports come from banking sector

National Security Minister Jack Warner, left, and Attorney General Anand Ramlogan.

Reporduced from the Trinidad GUARDIAN:

The majority of suspicious activity reports received by the Financial Intelligence Unit to date has come from the banking sector, according to Attorney General Anand Ramlogan. He said the reports which came from the banking sector in 2010 for example involved a monetary total of $263 million.

Ramlogan gave the figures during yesterday’s Senate debate on amendments to the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) Act, which the House of Representatives unanimously passed last Friday. The bill required a special majority and the amendments seek to expand the FIU’s scrutiny to all public authorities, companies and other bodies in a bid to curb money laundering. Ramlogan said money laundering funded terrorist activities across the globe.

He said the FIU was a “go-between” facility for flow of information on suspicious financial activities to law enforcement agencies. The FIU can also do investigations and impose administrative sanctions and “crack the whip on errant businesses.” Ramlogan paid tribute to the financial sector for the way it has responded to the FIU and its level of co-operation so far: “It has been nothing short of phenomenal,” he said. Ramlogan said the FIU’s report over February to September 2010 showed a total of 111  suspicious activities, of which 58 reports emanated from the banking sector.

FIU’s report for the period October 2011 to date showed suspicious activity reports had tripled to 303—yet half the suspicious activity reports again came from the banking sector. Ramlogan said that of about 126 reports of suspicious transactions, 65 were under ongoing investigation, 54 cases were closed and 14 intelligence reports were passed on to law enforcement agencies for probing.

Ramlogan said though T&T was on the ”grey list” of states which had not fully complied with all stipulations by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on the FIU, it was not on the “blacklist.” He said Venezuela, Antigua and other neighbouring states were also on the “grey list.”