Mark Bas­sant

Lead Ed­i­tor, In­ves­tiga­tive Desk

Mon­ey laun­der­ers, drug traf­fick­ers, gang­sters and oth­er un­der­world fig­ures are at­tempt­ing to ex­change their “dirty mon­ey” with the as­sis­tance of le­git­i­mate busi­ness­men by of­fer­ing them a fee to do the trans­ac­tion. This il­lic­it ac­tiv­i­ty is be­ing con­firmed by high rank­ing law en­force­ment of­fi­cers and se­nior fi­nan­cial sources as the coun­try phas­es out the old $100 note to the new poly­mer note that will be­come le­gal ten­der on Jan­u­ary 1.

“There is a re­al con­cern that busi­ness­men are ob­tain­ing il­lic­it funds and un­der­world fig­ures are will­ing to take a hit and are of­fer­ing these busi­ness­men $20 on every $100 to get the mon­ey in­to the sys­tem. This is some­thing we are ac­tive­ly mon­i­tor­ing,” said a high rank­ing law en­force­ment of­fi­cial in­volved in in­ves­ti­gat­ing white-col­lar crime and track­ing the move­ment of dirty mon­ey.

“With the De­cem­ber 31 dead­line ap­proach­ing we are see­ing cer­tain pat­terns to sug­gest this,” a se­nior fi­nan­cial source added.

They warned that any­one caught in this il­lic­it prac­tice is li­able un­der the Pro­ceeds of Crime Act.

Well placed in­tel­li­gence sources told Guardian Me­dia that in re­cent months po­lice had de­tained sev­er­al per­sons with large sums of TT and US coun­ter­feit cur­ren­cy. For­eign na­tion­als were al­so held and ap­pa­ra­tus that ap­peared to be for print­ing mon­ey had been re­cov­ered.

“We were told that the ma­chine seems to be able to print al­most flaw­less bills,” the source said.

Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith, con­tact­ed for com­ment, said he had “no knowl­edge about this.” But a high rank­ing law en­force­ment of­fi­cial who is fa­mil­iar with white-col­lar crim­i­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tions said: “to change the notes so quick­ly there must have been some­thing to have trig­gered this.”

“The in­for­ma­tion seems to be top-se­cret,” an­oth­er se­nior law en­force­ment source said.

A se­nior source in the fi­nan­cial sec­tor won­dered why the gov­ern­ment was quick to make the changes with­in three weeks when the poly­mer $50 note was in­tro­duced over six months.

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, who last week an­nounced the change in the $100 bills, would on­ly say it was a way to curb mon­ey laun­der­ing and stamp out or­gan­ised crime.

Mem­bers of the San Juan Busi­ness As­so­ci­a­tion (SJ­BA) al­so asked why the gov­ern­ment “hasn’t ad­dressed, nor com­mu­ni­cat­ed their thought process­es with com­mon, law-abid­ing cit­i­zens.”

Ac­cord­ing to a se­nior law en­force­ment sources, of­fi­cials from the Fi­nan­cial Ac­tion Task Force (FATF) and In­ter­na­tion­al Coun­try Risk Guide (ICRG) are ex­pect­ed to vis­it this coun­try with­in the next few weeks to check on the fi­nan­cial sys­tem. The ob­jec­tives of the FATF are set to stan­dards and pro­mote ef­fec­tive im­ple­men­ta­tion of le­gal reg­u­la­to­ry and op­er­a­tional mea­sures for com­bat­ing mon­ey laun­der­ing, ter­ror­ist fi­nanc­ing, and re­lat­ed threats to the in­ter­na­tion­al fi­nan­cial sys­tem.

“I think our sys­tem from four years ago to now has cer­tain­ly im­proved. We had a lot of de­fi­cien­cies then but now things are dif­fer­ent and I ex­pect FATF will be quite pleased with the strides Trinidad and To­ba­go have made,” the source said.

Be­tween 2016-2017, FATF con­sid­ered the progress made by T&T in ad­dress­ing de­fi­cien­cies with An­ti-Mon­ey Laun­der­ing and Com­bat­ting the Fi­nanc­ing of Ter­ror­ism (AML/CFT). How­ev­er, FATF’s pro­ce­dures re­quired pub­li­ca­tion of agreed mea­sures to ad­dress the re­main­ing de­fi­cien­cies in the com­pli­ance doc­u­ment. This coun­try was first added to this doc­u­ment in No­vem­ber 2017.

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi said then pub­li­ca­tion of the up­dat­ed com­pli­ance doc­u­ment re­flect­ed con­crete steps that had tak­en to im­prove the coun­try’ss AML/CFT regime since No­vem­ber 2017.