SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

shar­lene.ram­per­sad@guardian.co.tt

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi is now urg­ing mem­bers of the pub­lic to re­port any coun­ter­feit cur­ren­cy they en­counter.

Al Rawi was asked by Guardian Me­dia at yes­ter­day’s post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing, what his of­fice could do about sev­er­al re­ports of coun­ter­feit poly­mer $100 bills in cir­cu­la­tion.

He in­sist­ed that the Fi­nance Min­is­ter and the Cen­tral Bank nev­er said that the poly­mer $100 bill is im­mune to coun­ter­feit.

“There have al­ways been coun­ter­feits from time im­memo­r­i­al. One should al­ways be care­ful to in­spect what you have. It was nev­er said by the Cen­tral Bank or the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance that the poly­mer note was in­ca­pable of peo­ple try­ing a fast one. What the Cen­tral Bank, the Min­is­ter and the pro­duc­ers of the notes said is that has more se­cu­ri­ty fea­tures which you can re­ly up­on to en­sure against coun­ter­feit­ing,” Al Rawi said.

He said he is en­cour­ag­ing peo­ple to re­port any coun­ter­feit cur­ren­cy they have in their pos­ses­sion so law en­force­ment agen­cies can go to work.

He said in oth­er parts of the world, mer­chants arm them­selves with the equip­ment nec­es­sary to check for coun­ter­feit bills and T&T cit­i­zens have that same ‘pos­i­tive oblig­a­tion.’

“You must ex­pect ‘smart­man­ism’ and coun­ter­feit­ing to al­ways be a fea­ture of our so­ci­ety, what the gov­ern­ment can do is make it hard­er and hard­er for that to hap­pen by im­prov­ing se­cu­ri­ty fea­tures,” he said.

The AG’s state­ment came a day af­ter Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert, re­spond­ing to a ques­tion in Par­lia­ment, say­ing he was told by the Bankers’ As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (BATT) that re­ports of coun­ter­feit bills in cir­cu­la­tion were ‘mis­in­for­ma­tion.’

Guardian Me­dia con­tact­ed BATT yes­ter­day and sent a list of ques­tions via email. How­ev­er, up un­til 6 pm, we re­ceived no re­sponse.

Guardian Me­dia al­so reached out to the Cen­tral Bank yes­ter­day but there was no re­sponse to ques­tions sent via email.

On Mon­day, a ven­dor of the Cen­tral Mar­ket in Port-of-Spain re­port­ed re­ceiv­ing a fake poly­mer note in a wad of re­al $100 bills while sell­ing pro­duce at the mar­ket. The ven­dor gave the bill to Guardian Me­dia on Mon­day and it was lat­er re­turned to him. On Tues­day, a BATT ex­ec­u­tive mem­ber met with a Guardian Me­dia news team, pre­sent­ing four fake poly­mer notes. Two of those bills were print­ed on a high gloss pa­per and the oth­er two on reg­u­lar pa­per.

All five bills had repli­cas of a trans­par­ent win­dow in the top left of the bill and an X in braille on the bot­tom right.

Those two fea­tures were in­clud­ed in the re­al poly­mer note to en­sure coun­ter­feit­ers would not be able to du­pli­cate it.

None of those four coun­ter­feit bills glowed un­der an ul­tra­vi­o­let (UV) light when put to the test - a ma­jor in­di­ca­tion that they were fakes.