‘Old-fashioned’ economic crimes unit seriously limited – Brussels experts

The capacity for the Maltese police force to fight economic crime and investigate fraud and corruption is “old-fashioned”, “reactive” and is hampered by the “attitude presented by senior management.”

A report for the EU’s Council of Ministers by a group of experts from Interpol, OLAF and Eurojust, says Malta’s economic crimes unit (ECU) is composed of “highly motivated and dedicate personnel”, but the lack of a national strategy makes the fight against economic crimes “reactive and not based on comprehensive threat assessments.”

“Apart from political decisions, the problem seems to be related to lack of capacity-building and the attitude presented by the senior management,” the report says without ever entering into the specifics of its concerns.

The ECU is composed of seven police inspectors, two of whom form the money-laundering unit, and an assistant commissioner and police superintendent.

But the experts say there is no separate training devoted to financial investigations for police, and only ECU inspectors regularly attend training seminars to remain abreast of investigative and prosecutorial developments.

“No automated case-management system and no crime-analysis software are put at the disposal of the unit,” the experts say in their report.

“This, combined with limited capacity and unwillingness to undertake analytical efforts, has a consequence that there is no pro-active approach to financial crime.

“This attitude to policing is largely reactive and old-fashioned and needs to be addressed by the Force’s senior management.”

Even the prosecution office faces similar problems because there are no statistics on financial crime available, and no effort is being made to produce assessments of the threats imposed by financial crime.

Government sources however told MaltaToday that the justice and home affairs ministry and the police force were working on developing a statistical mechanism to monitor court decisions on criminal assets and their execution.

Problems were also identified with Malta’s financial intelligence analysis unit (FIAU), which is led by the Attorney General and is also tasked with the investigation of terrorism-related transactions.

The report says the FIAU has no central register of bank accounts, meaning that it takes a couple of weeks to identify bank accounts, slowing down investigations.

“One important shortcoming of the FIAU is obviously the complete absence of any appropriate analytical software. The unit is looking for funding to make necessary purchases.”

The report was compiled by the Council secretariat’s Multidisciplinary Group on Organised Crime (MDG), to evaluate the judicial reaction to the financial crisis.

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