Now that the National Assembly has taken a break and everyone
has had the opportunity to assimilate the vast volume of corruption and
irregularities that have been exposed and which obviously have plagued the
country for years, the aspect which has caused a fair share of surprise, if not
disgust, is the role of the Irish in the FIU and the NDEA.
It first started with the most ridiculous notion imported into
the Assembly that the FIU should have a CLASSIFIED building in Seychelles. Harbouring
such absurdity, the director of the FIU refused to reveal the existence of an office
block occupied by the FIU Irish officers.
It was only after being threatened by a member of the
National Assembly with contempt of the house for providing false information to
the effect that the FIU office was in the Central Bank and that the FIU had no
other office, that he admitted to the occupation of a building block by the
FIU. Finally realising how totally ludicrous the classified notion had been, he
ended up inviting all the National Assembly members to visit the office building,
to dispel accusations of illegal activities in the building.
It is believed that the Irish FIU officers had fooled the
director and all staff of the need not to disclose the existence of the
building for security reasons, in order to hide a private gym in the office
building for the Irish officers, at the expense of taxpayers.
Moving from the ridiculous to the tragic, the FIU pretended
to know all manner of things about Al Shabab in Somalia, which was in fact no part
of their stationary mandate, let alone the fact that the CIA and other European
Intelligence agencies do not have much of a clue what is happening in that
country where no one has been able to predict or stop terrorist attacks in the
heart of the country, within its capital.
With all that claim to intelligence information, however, all
laughed when they did not have a clue who owned the land and building they
occupied.
Then came the cherry on the cake of information, the Irish lawyer
who was paid over 3 million rupees a year as state counsel handling money
laundering cases, had not managed to obtained a single conviction for money laundering
during all the years that the Seychellois taxpayers continued paying him one of
the highest salary paid to a civil servant in Seychelles and many times more
than his boss the Attorney General.
As if the above was not enough to shock everyone, we also
learnt that the FIU has according to them embarked on counter terrorism
activity which is also totally outside their mandate, let alone the fact that
none of the Irish had any knowledge, experience or clue about counter
terrorism. Blown out of our minds, we also heard that there were also entities
overseas and locally who had been paid millions of rupees by taxpayers to
provide intelligence information. This one was offensive as they were taking
Seychellois for a bunch of lunatics, as we all know that Interpol, FBI, MI5 and
other multinational and National intelligence agencies gladly exchange
intelligence for free to combat international criminal activities. Only crooks
are paid to catch crooks, so the Seychellois need to know who were being paid.
The Assembly should now seek the names of all those entities
which are being paid as no one is convinced that there are any other agencies out
there.
Another favourite pastime of the FIU was to write fake and
filthy reports on individuals to present to gullible and naive state entities
to influence decisions against persons seen as opposition supporters. All done
to carry favour with the Government of the day to protect their undeserving and
highly inflated salaries.
Finally, to give themselves importance and frighten
government into believing that they were indispensable, they used scare
mongering tactics, the most nonsensical one being their advice to government, as
disclosed in the Assembly, that Seychelles was a high risk jurisdiction when in
fact, with such low volume circulating in our banking system, we are of the
lowest risk, never mind that Seychelles officially is not ranked as high risk
in all international indexes. How the FIU managed to fool the Government for so
long is indeed most baffling, using in the process expressions like de-risking,
totally out of context as they did not have a clue what it really meant in the
financial and banking world.
It is heard on the grapevines that many of the Irishmen working
with the FIU and NDEA are leaving the country and if that is true, the
Government and Police will have failed this country for the feeling out there
is that all the Irishmen who have worked in the FIU or the NDEA should be
immediately investigated and if it is too late, as all the Irish officers have
gone, then Government has a duty to cleanse this country of the dubious
activities of the FIU whereby most of the funds taken from the bank accounts in
Seychelles were claimed to be taxes owed by those clients to foreign
jurisdictions, but the FIU never fulfilled the sovereign obligation of Seychelles
to remit such taxes to the countries to which those taxes were alleged to be
due, but instead kept such funds and swindled all those countries while the
Government closed its eyes though clear evidence had been given that such
illegal practises were taking place.
Government should now audit those funds taken by the FIU and
to save the honour and reputation of this country, return such taxes to those
respective countries, regardless whether they will laugh at us that our FIU
were collecting taxes on their behalf with no proof whatsoever that it was due
in the first instance, but only collected by threats and harassment.
If these countries do not accept such funds, then it should
be refunded to its original owners as they had been cheated under false
pretences. Government has in many instances been warned that FIU officials who
were the watchdog over money laundering, were themselves engaged in money
laundering when they took a part of the funds in the bank account which they
alleged albeit falsely, was dirty money and allowed the owners to go away with
the rest in order to get a quick buck without proper court proceedings.
The final question which remains is whether the government institutions
duped by the FIU were simply stupid or were they in connivance. Only a proper
investigation will reveal the answer which is essential to avoid a repetition
in future when it is apparent that even the Central Bank and the Attorney
General’s Chambers merrily went along with it all, with even the courts
obliging by extending freezing orders for several period of 180 days to allow
the FIU to embark on the fictitious tax collection exercises.
Source:Seychelles Weekly
