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SOCU gets Head Quarters – Dr. Luncheon
Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr. Roger Luncheon, yesterday said that the Special Organized Crime Unit (SOCU), a recommendation from the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force (CFATF) to increase the country’s fighting capacity in money laundering, has been provided with a headquarters.
SOCU headquarters
The SOCU headquarters, according to Luncheon, will be located on Camp Street south of the Central Immigration (Passport) Office.
He said that Cabinet “will consider the estimates that have been submitted for the rehabilitation of the building and for the resourcing of SOCU.”
This, he said, would entail Fixtures, Furniture and Equipment (FFE’S) for the building in addition to “recruitment of the compliment of staff and associated expenditure.”
According to Luncheon, the government will incorporate CFATF recommendations from a non legislative perspective to improve their blacklisting status and compliance with the bodies Anti Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) regulations.
Cabinet, last November, approved the creation and the operationalization of SOCU to investigate suspected financial transactions such as, money laundering and financing of terrorism.
The unit will be under the Commissioner of Police, and will have a close relationship with the Finance Ministry.
“SOCU is intended to be Guyana’s response to its treaty obligations to investigate suspicious financial transactions that are suggestive of money laundering.”
When Dr. Luncheon announced the creation of SOCU, he had stated that the investigators would be taken from the Joint Services and the security sector.
At the time Dr. Luncheon had said, that in order to properly facilitate the recommendations of CFATF as it pertains to suspected financial transitions, support is needed from “bilateral and multilateral partners”.
Dr. Luncheon did say that the intention is to have a “fairly professional and competent capacity in Guyana” to investigate such offences as soon as possible.
Speaking on how the SOCU will operate, Luncheon said that the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) which is the statutory body monitoring the financial sector, will in its mandate, obtain information about suspicious financial transactions, compile the information and make it available to the SOCU.
“SOCU armed with the information, will then conduct investigations to establish whither these transactions are indeed money laundering transactions or financing terrorism transactions” once an offence has been uncovered, the necessary steps would be taken to have offenders prosecuted.
Luncheon had said that the procedure before the advent of SOCU was that the Financial Intelligence Unit would provide the necessary information that it received pertaining to illegalities of money laundering to the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP).
Now that SOCU will be in place the FIU information will be directed to it.
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