Dedicated team in police needed to combat ML

Sri Lanka needs a dedicated team in the police to pursue money trail and solve complex white-collar crimes, Central Bank (CB) officials have impressed upon the President.

There are grand white-collar crimes and money laundering cases where the present law enforcement is basically doing nothing, they lamented. “We need dedicated police officers in the near future who can follow the cash trail and pursue it transaction by transaction,” one official told the Business Times on Wednesday.

He also said that CB has been requesting for a special court to fasttrack white-collar financial crimes. This came on the back of the CB’s Financial Intelligence Unit in its recent sanitised report of the 2021/22 National Risk Assessment (NRA) on Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (ML/TF) which has assessed the overall risk for the country as medium. The NRA identified Drug Trafficking, Bribery and Corruption, Customs related Offences including Laundering of Trade-Based Proceeds, as the most prevalent predicate offences, where the ML threat was rated as medium high.

Officials say that already there is a significant complexity for government authorities and regulators when combatting offences such as money laundering (ML) and other financial crime. “They are long drawn and take a lot of time. It is already difficult for government authorities and regulators to bring perpetrators to justice,” another official said. He said the relevant officials need to go to other jurisdictions and collaborate with their parallel institutions in these countries, to bring criminals to justice. “We basically need a separate set up for this. We cannot solve it within one to two years.”

Statistics show that fewer antimoney laundering and terrorist financing cases pursued by the CB, indicted since the Money Laundering Act were enacted in 2006. “Statistics speak for themselves, and it is not a good show,” a second official said. “ML techniques entail several phases such as placement, layering, and integration, which would reincarnate the source of illegal earns. Therefore, it is vital to detect, investigate, curtail and prosecute to restrict ML activities through strong AML regulatory mechanisms and enforcement procedures.”