Mission Impossible 6: Rogue money

Sep 12, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I sat between two staff members of the Assets Recovery Unit at the cremation of Andaiye’s father, Dr. Frank Williams; Tacuma Ogunseye and Desmond Trotman. While we were talking, Dr. Henry Jeffrey came up and started to chat with us. Obviously the discussion had to turn to assets recovery.

Jeffrey looked at Tacuma and offered some intellectual advice. He observed that recovering illegal funds will take more than ten years. Jeffrey opined that the people from the last government who stole money weren’t stupid; they would have taken the best brains to hide the stuff.

Jeffrey is right. There are thousands of ultra wealthy Americans and Europeans who cheat on their taxes and the powerful US with its ultra-modern investigating techniques cannot catch them. It was under the last Bush presidency that Switzerland opened up some of its files after extensive pressure by President Bush.

Obama continued in that vein but the American taxman only netted a few thousands. The US and British Governments only learned about holders of accounts in the offshore banking systems in some small islands around the world after documents were leaked by whistle blowers.

In reporting on that story, the Guardian of the UK described how complex and secret is the system that it is not easy for these tax-dodgers to be caught. One top economist put the secret stuff at US$32 trillion. No you are not reading wrongly nor have I stated a wrong figure. Some of the money is not in the name of the owners and a labyrinthine trail makes it impossible to find names.

Here is an extract from a Guardian article, “As well as Britons hiding wealth offshore, an extraordinary array of Government officials and rich families across the world are identified, from Canada, the US, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran, China, Thailand and former communist states.

The data seen by the Guardian shows that their secret companies are based mainly in the British Virgin Islands (end of quote.) In the UK and the US where state funds are scare and the state has to cut back on many programs that benefit the poor, US$32 trillion if taxed would bring in billions to the Treasury

Why billionaires get away with tax evasion is because the financial laws of capitalism were intended to make it difficult for government to pry into the financial account of companies. If people can cheat on the IRS and the American Government with its unbeatable tentacles cannot catch them then the Guyana Government faces an almost impossible situation.

My belief is that money stolen from the state in Guyana the last fifteen years is not sitting in a foreign account in the name of those who just lost power. It is far more complicated than that and it will not be easy to follow the money (remember in the Watergate scandal, Deep Throat told Bernstein and Woodward, “Follow the money”. They did and it led to the fall of President Nixon). In Guyana, there is no paper trail in which you can follow the money. Those funds are in the accounts of people that are closely related to the former PPP officials but their names are very different. How can the American Government know that John Spike with a ten million dollar bank account is related to a former Minister named Sookhoo.

If you have ten million dollars in the bank, the American Government will never go after you because that is considered a very small saving by American standards. A lower middle class immigrant would have that after twenty years of savings. That figure would not be considered money that came from laundering. Now over a hundred million American dollars is probably spread over ten accounts and this is where it becomes difficult to pick up stolen money from Guyana by foreign governments.

I believe trusted Guyanese business people and trusted relatives have the stolen money in their names and that is where the insurmountable journey begins. A hundred million American dollars is too large a sum to steal from one of the poorest countries in the world but if that figure is spread in twenty different bank books in six foreign countries, it is a gargantuan task to recover the money.

One reason explains it; the money in individual accounts is too small to attract American and Canadian curiosity. Jeffrey says it will take more than ten years. It may never be recovered.

In the meantime, the GRA should move quickly to demand that some people who became wealthy overnight, explain this sudden wealth like the woman who sold a house in Pradoville 2 for a million American dollars.