Guyanese Online

(Trinidad Guardian) In the last three days, sev­er­al sus­pi­cious trans­ac­tions by du­bi­ous pro­fes­sion­als have been un­earthed in the bank­ing sec­tor as thou­sands of cus­tomers con­tin­ue to rush fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions to ex­change their ex­ist­ing $100 bill for the new $100 poly­mer notes.

The old $100 notes will be­come in­valid on De­cem­ber 31, 2019

The changeover from pa­per to poly­mer is the ba­sis of Gov­ern­ment’s lat­est an­ti-crime plan to flush out crim­i­nal el­e­ments, cut off fund­ing of gangs and take the prof­it out of crime.       

Im­bert was first to talk about the sus­pi­cious ac­tiv­i­ties, stat­ing that he re­ceived re­ports yes­ter­day that some cus­tomers had been vis­it­ing banks with “large quan­ti­ties of cash.”

Im­bert said some of these in­di­vid­u­als are find­ing it dif­fi­cult to fill out a source of funds de­c­la­ra­tion form “to in­di­cate where they got the mon­ey from.”

If some­one walked in­to a bank with a $1 mil­lion in cash and claimed it was their sav­ings over the years, Im­bert said: “It can prove to be a chal­lenge.”

“We are deal­ing with the is­sues as they arise. As is­sues come up we are ad­dress­ing it,” Im­bert said.

He said com­mer­cial banks and Cen­tral Bank have been work­ing with the Gov­ern­ment.

Young ad­mit­ted that in the last three days banks have picked up in the sys­tem some un­usu­al trans­ac­tions.

Pressed by re­porters to give ex­am­ples of peo­ple claim­ing to have “pro­fes­sions” and had showed up at banks with large sums of cash in ex­change for the $100 poly­mer note, Young said he could not di­vulge much as the state’s se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices and heads of se­cu­ri­ty at his min­istry have been work­ing on in­tel­li­gence and gath­er­ing cer­tain in­for­ma­tion.

“We had some ridicu­lous ex­am­ples of per­sons go­ing to le­git­i­mate busi­ness­es plac­ing or­ders in cash and then can­celling the or­ders when it is time to col­lect and say, well, give me a cheque in­stead. Per­sons are turn­ing up at the banks try­ing to cash hun­dreds of thou­sands…. mil­lions of dol­lars in some in­stances….telling us it is a very du­bi­ous pro­fes­sion as to where the mon­ey came from,” he said.

Young cit­ed an in­di­vid­ual who iden­ti­fied him­self as “a bar­ber with over $1 mil­lion in cash. That is a very ex­pen­sive set of hair­cuts. Again, I am not cast­ing any as­per­sions.”

In the study of what they ex­pect­ed, Young said it is with­in the am­bit of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice and Cus­toms and Ex­cise when faced with in­di­vid­u­als with large sums of mon­ey “who can­not pro­vide a prop­er ex­pla­na­tion as to how they ac­quired the mon­ey” or “have sus­pi­cion on the pro­ceed of crime” that they car­ry out an in­ter­ro­ga­tion process, and if not sat­is­fied with their an­swer, a seizure takes place and then it goes to court.

“That is be­ing em­ployed across the coun­try.”

Young could not say how many trans­ac­tions were flagged since banks be­gan ex­chang­ing the old for the new notes.

Young re­mind­ed the pop­u­la­tion that mon­ey laun­der­ing was a crim­i­nal of­fence and any­one who fa­cil­i­tat­ed mon­ey laun­der­ing can al­so be charged.

The Gov­ern­ment, he said, did not cre­ate any new law to the amend­ment the Cen­tral Bank Act to have the de­mon­eti­sa­tion process done, point­ing out that the Ex­plain Your Wealth Bill was passed months ago to take the prof­it out of crime which they have been clamp­ing down on.