EDITORIAL - Bring FID under the police

The authorities may have had entirely good reasons for establishing the Financial Investigation Division (FID) as part of the finance ministry rather than part of the regular police.

But after nearly a decade of the FID's existence, we do not only believe that the decision should be reviewed - as Security Minister Dwight Nelson said is the case - but reversed. The Financial Investigation Division should become a unit of the Jamaica Constabulary Force - and it should happen soon.

As we understand it, when it was set up, the FID was tasked primarily with investigating financial and other related crimes. In that also is the job of ferreting out assets that are the proceeds of crime and helping the responsible government agency to garnish these via the courts.

Our sense is that the FID's performance in any of these areas has, at best, been mediocre. And this is not because of an absence of money laundering and other financial crimes in Jamaica. There is much of that.

Faulty radar?

Indeed, the United States authorities made out what the Jamaican Government now concedes is a prima facie case of drug smuggling and gunrunning against reputed drug boss, Christopher Coke. It is to be assumed, therefore, that there is a more-than-reasonable suspicion that Coke and his organisation would have repatriated some of the money it made from the alleged foreign drug business for laundering in Jamaica.

There is no evidence that Coke's organisation has, in an aggressive sense, been on the radar of the FID. Neither do we get the sense of other reputed criminal enterprises and their principals being under the agency's scrutiny.

The prosecution of cases of money laundering are few to non-existent. Applications for seizing assets believed to be the proceeds of crime, in which the FID assists the Assets Recovery Agency, are similarly few and far between. Instead, scandal has swirled around the FID's protection of assets that are supposed to be in its care, as well as reported resistance of some of its agents to subject themselves to integrity testing.

Part of the problem, we suspect, is that the FID and its companion agencies, ensconced as they are in the finance ministry, do not psychologically perceive themselves to be part of law enforcement, notwithstanding their need to work closely with the police.

Estrangement cannot continue

This estrangement cannot continue if Jamaica intends to vigorously pursue and defeat organised crime and gangs, to which Prime Minister Bruce Golding has lately declared himself committed. One effective way of doing this is going after the assets of the gangsters, as part of a broader operation that includes arrest and imprisonment of gang members.

The law-enforcement process should be seamless. Or, more to the the point, the FID cannot assume itself apart from the gritty efforts of the police. Which is why we support the agency being brought under the ambit of the police force as perhaps a unit in the constabulary-organised crime division.

But even ahead of that transition, all members of the FID should be subject to integrity testing and, if practicable, probes by Justine Felice's anti-corruption unit of the police force.

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