Allegations of money-laundering against gold dealer
GUYANA - More details are coming out that would raise alarming questions over the lax attention paid by regulators to transactions of embattled gold dealer, Saddiqi ‘Bobby’ Rasul. Over a threemonth period, September to November last year, Rasul’s gold dealing company, SSS Mineral Trading Enterprises, conducted over $7.67B in sales with the Guyana Gold Board (GGB) representing over 31,790 ounces sold. Of that, he used a company named R. Mining Inc. that he reportedly controls, to process and sell to GGB over 19,500 ounces alone. It is believed that that quantity of gold is what was purchased from legit miners but passed through R. Mining to make it appear as mined gold. Under arrangements, mining companies are only obliged to pay five percent royalties upfront. They are not obligated to pay an additional two percent tax like small miners are mandated to do. As a result, over that three-month period, an estimated $95.5M was lost in taxes (two percent of the gross value to GGB).
Why the GGB, and the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) never questioned how one mining company managed to produce over 19,500 ounces of gold over a three-month period is the big question now. Not even the large scale producers – and there are two of them currently in the country – managed to meet that when they first started. Under tough anti-money laundering regulations passed by government, regulators have to be on the lookout for suspicious transactions and report these. In the case of Rasul, there are no indications that any of R. Mining’s transactions raised any red-flags, not from GGB or GGMC, which monitor the mining areas.
Rasul, who became one of the biggest dealers by the end of last year, was last week slapped with several fraud charges. He was accused of, in late March, depositing a number of bounced cheques at the Bartica branch of the Guyana Bank for Trade and Industry and later withdrawing over $950M. The Ministry of Natural Resources has since announced that it has asked a new board of directors of GGB to investigate whether any staffers had colluded with Rasul and his companies. The matter has also been handed over to the police’s Special Organized Crime Unit (SOCU) to probe the money laundering allegations.
(kaieteurnews.com) The risk of mass starvation in four countries - northeast Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen - is rapidly rising due to drought and conflict, the U.N. refugee agency said on Tuesday. Some 20 million people live in hard-hit areas where harvests have failed and malnutrition rates are increasing, particularly among young children, it said.
In South Sudan alone where the United Nations declared famine in some areas in February “a further 1 million people are now on the brink of famine”, UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said. “We are raising our alarm level further by today warning that the risk of mass deaths from starvation among populations in the Horn of Africa, Yemen and Nigeria is growing,” Edwards told a news briefing. “This really is an absolutely critical situation that is rapidly unfolding across a large swathe of Africa from west to east,” he said. People are on the run within their countries and there are also greater numbers of South Sudanese refugees fleeing to Sudan and Uganda, according to the UNHCR, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. A preventable humanitarian catastrophe, possibly worse than that of 2011 when 260,000 people died of famine in the Horn of Africa, half of them children, “is fast becoming an inevitability”, Edwards said. “Always the problem that we have with humanitarian crises in subSaharan Africa is that they tend to get overlooked until things are too late,” he said. “A repeat must be avoided at all costs.” UNHCR is scaling up its operations but is stymied by a severe funding shortfall, with some of the country programs only funded at between 3 and 11 percent, he said.
Overall the United Nations has appealed for $4.4 billion for the four countries but has received less $984 million or 21 percent to date, Jens Laerke of the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.
(Reuters.com)