TT MONEY FOR TERRORISTS

Young made this disclosure at the final post-Cabinet news conference FOR 2016 at the Office of the Prime Minister in St Clair, Port-of-Spain.

“What the FIU has picked up in their STRs (Suspicious Transaction Reports) and SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports) is that approximately 182 TT citizens, we suspect, may be involved in the financing of terrorist activities,” Young said.

He added the total monetary value of the 739 STRs submitted to the FIU for this year was $805.5 million and this represented a 127 percent increase in the STR submissions to the FIU in 2015.

Explaining that the STRs and SARs could involve banks, financial institutions, private members clubs, attorneys and real estate agents, Young said the focus is on, “certain countries in the Middle East and near to the Middle East.” He reminded reporters that his ministry obtained orders under the Anti- Terrorism Act this year, “to have certain persons declared terrorists and freeze their accounts et cetera, including ISIS and all of the bodies that we know of from the United Nations.” Young said local law enforcement agencies have been collaborating with their international partners on countries such as Syria, Turkey and the United Kingdom as some jurisdictions where terrorist financing could be taking place.

Declaring that, “all criminal activity is of concern to us in TT,” Young said in addition to providing local law enforcement with the resources they require, Government continues to improve, “channels of communication with our international partners who have better global monitoring policies, information and intelligence gathering.” Young said critical information is, “filtering back to us in TT.” In addition, Young said the Financial Intelligence Bureau of the Police Service has been, “conducting a number of criminal investigations into some of these transactions....

especially some related to the financing of terrorism and other white collar crimes.” He also disclosed that his ministry and the National Security Ministry have negotiated with the US Department of Justice to train local law enforcement officers to deal with these types of white collar crimes.

Young said the FIU report also highlighted other areas of concern over this year. “We have an emergence of wire transfers to jurisdictions suspected in involvement in human trafficking and the use of fraudulent certificates of insurance and false documentation to support claims arising from motor vehicular accidents,” Young stated.

He was unable to specifically identify the jurisdictions to which money was being wired to in respect of human trafficking but did not deny that some of these places could be in Latin America.

He said the FIU also found, “a continuance of the use of bank accounts for lottery fraud and employment fraud.” He indicated the FIU also saw, “frequent and small intra-island money transfers and advance fee fraud scams using unsolicited emails and posts.” Young lamented, “Unfortunately, we still have citizens who are falling prey to the schemes and the scams.” He cited the continuation of the repatriation of funds via wire transfers and money remittances to foreign jurisdictions by non-nationals and expatriates as another source of concern.

Another concern Young identified was,”the use of forged documents for obtaining loans for multiple financial institutions and co-mingling of accounts between individuals and their private company accounts for the financial tax avoidance purposes.” He said local law enforcement agencies and their international partners have found, “an increasing use of these remittances, some of which are suspected to be financing foreign terrorist fighters abroad” being done through channels such as small kiosks in public places which are used for wire transfers.