Pe­ter Bal­roop

?Deputy Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Ray­mond Craig is prob­a­bly the most pro­fes­sion­al white col­lar crime buster in the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice, yet the Gov­ern­ment has cho­sen to chan­nel his en­er­gies to di­rect­ing ve­hic­u­lar traf­fic. The scathing al­le­ga­tion was lev­elled by for­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al, UNC Tabaquite MP Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj in the Low­er House last Fri­day dur­ing de­bate on amend­ments to the Pro­ceeds of Crime Bill, 2009. He re­ferred to how Craig's ser­vices were be­ing used to drama­tise his point that the PNM Gov­ern­ment was not se­ri­ous about fight­ing white col­lar crime in T&T and was sim­ply seek­ing to pass the Bill at the 11th hour to sat­is­fy its in­ter­na­tion­al oblig­a­tions. The Bill was even­tu­al­ly passed, but Ma­haraj as well as his UNC col­league, Princes Town North MP Sub­has Pan­day, aired sev­er­al con­cerns about the amend­ments. Dur­ing the UNC Ad­min­is­tra­tion in 2001, a task force head­ed by Craig was set up in the Po­lice Ser­vice to tack­le mon­ey laun­der­ing. Craig had been trained by white col­lar crime ex­perts from the USA, Unit­ed King­dom and Cana­da and had been suc­cess­ful in lay­ing charges against sev­er­al peo­ple, Ma­haraj re­called.

How­ev­er, since the PNM took over the Gov­ern­ment in 2002, to date, there had been no mon­ey laun­der­ing pros­e­cu­tions. Ma­haraj said he was sur­prised to see Craig had ap­par­ent­ly been re­as­signed to the Traf­fic Branch. Told by At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie that Craig was with the Firearms In­ter­dic­tion Unit, Ma­haraj in­sist­ed he saw Craig do­ing du­ties on the road. He might have been look­ing for firearms car­ried by mo­torists, Ma­haraj said. He in­sist­ed that when pro­fes­sion­als like Craig who could fight white col­lar crime were not put to work at jobs they could do best, like be­ing post­ed to the Fi­nan­cial In­tel­li­gence Unit (FIU), then it was doomed to be­ing a white ele­phant. Pan­day was con­cerned about an amend­ment which or­dered that when a fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion or busi­ness con­cern made a sus­pi­cious trans­ac­tion or sus­pi­cious ac­tiv­i­ty re­port to the FIU the di­rec­tors and staff of the busi­ness place mak­ing the re­port were not to di­vulge any of that in­for­ma­tion to any­one else or they would be guilty of an of­fence which would mer­it a fine of $250,000 and im­pris­on­ment for three years.

He in­ter­pret­ed this pro­vi­sion to be a step that would lead to the pri­vati­sa­tion of cor­rup­tion. T&T is now at its high­est rank­ing in the lat­est Glob­al Cor­rup­tion Per­cep­tion re­port, Pan­day warned. He was al­so un­hap­py about the pro­pos­al for the FIU to sub­mit an­nu­al re­ports to a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee of Par­lia­ment, re­call­ing that the Gov­ern­ment had want­ed to have the Ude­cott probe con­duct­ed by such a com­mit­tee and had to be force­ful­ly dis­suad­ed by the Op­po­si­tion. Ear­li­er, Ma­haraj had called on the Gov­ern­ment to tell the na­tion how it planned to get the pub­lic to co-op­er­ate with the FIU in the cause of com­bat­ting white col­lar crime. He made the call in the con­text of na­tion­als, in the face of ris­ing crime nev­er­the­less, be­ing scared to even ven­ture in­to a po­lice sta­tion. Ma­haraj said he want­ed the Gov­ern­ment to say how it in­tend­ed to im­prove the Po­lice Ser­vice to be in a bet­ter po­si­tion to pro­tect peo­ple from crime. The peo­ple in T&T to­day were liv­ing in a coun­try that was "to­tal­ly law­less," said Ma­haraj.