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Friday, July 25, 2025

$3 billion in suspicious transactions from 2020 to 2021

by

1287 days ago
20220114

Tamika Amora

The Fi­nan­cial In­tel­li­gence Unit (FIU) re­ceived 1,638 Sus­pi­cious Trans­ac­tion Re­ports/Sus­pi­cious Ac­tiv­i­ty re­ports val­ued at $3.1 bil­lion over 2020 and 2021.

Some $2 bil­lion of that in­volved trans­ac­tions that were com­plet­ed.

In­for­ma­tion on the sit­u­a­tion was giv­en in the FIU’s re­port for Oc­to­ber 2020-Sep­tem­ber 2021.

This was laid in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert who spoke about the re­port’s con­tents.

For the last year end­ing Sep­tem­ber 2021, some 506 en­ti­ties reg­is­tered with the FIU bring­ing to 3,766 its to­tal num­ber of reg­is­trants.

Over the 2020-2021 pe­ri­od, 1,041 com­pli­ance ex­am­i­na­tions were done on 972 su­per­vised en­ti­ties.

There was an 11 per cent de­crease in STR/SARs over the pre­vi­ous year which the re­port stat­ed could be at­trib­uted to the re­stric­tions on list­ed busi­ness­es dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

Sub­mis­sions from in­sur­ance com­pa­nies, mort­gage com­pa­nies, jew­ellers and pri­vate mem­bers’ clubs all de­creased over the pe­ri­od.

The bank­ing sec­tor sub­mit­ted 82 per cent of the re­ports for 2020-21.

But 1,449 of the 1,638 STR/SARs re­ceived by the FIU val­ued at $2.B were com­plet­ed trans­ac­tions and on­ly 189 (val­ued at $1B) were at­tempt­ed trans­ac­tions.

This rep­re­sent­ed a 136 per cent in­crease in com­plet­ed trans­ac­tions and a 96 per cent de­crease in at­tempt­ed trans­ac­tions when com­pared with the pre­vi­ous re­port­ing pe­ri­od.

Sus­pect­ed tax eva­sion ranked the high­est among the five most com­mon rea­sons for sub­mis­sion of STRS/SARs to the FIU, rep­re­sent­ing 534 peo­ple.

This was fol­lowed by mon­ey laun­der­ing (477 peo­ple), sus­pi­cious fi­nan­cial ac­tiv­i­ty (290), fraud (231) and breach of ex­change con­trol (40).

Of the 1,638 STR/SARs re­ceived, 16 per cent (262 re­ports) were pri­mar­i­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with the de­mon­eti­sa­tion of the cot­ton-based hun­dred-dol­lar notes. Of these, 24 re­ports were sub­mit­ted by the Cen­tral Bank un­der the Pro­ceeds of Crime Act.


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