FID to continue forfeiture proceedings against Alliance Finance Limited
Published:Sunday | April 7, 2024 | 6:19 AM
The Financial Investigations Division (FID) has indicated it is continuing its forfeiture proceedings against Alliance Finance Limited (AFL), in relation to breaches of the Bank of Jamaica and Banking Services acts, despite last week’s court ruling.
In March 2022, AFL was fined a total of $21.4 million in the Kingston and St Andrew Parish Court for the breaches. The company had pleaded guilty to several counts of financial crimes, in January 2022.
The FID subsequently initiated and completed a criminal forfeiture investigation against AFL, regarding its benefit from the offences for which it was convicted.
The file is currently before the Supreme Court for forfeiture hearing later this year.
Alliance Investment Management Limited (AIML) was also charged with 17 counts of failure to file threshold transaction reports. However, a no-case submission was last week upheld by the court in relation to those charges.
The FID said, while it respects the ruling, it does not affect ongoing efforts to recover the full benefits obtained by AFL from the offences for which it was convicted.
However, in response to FID’s statement, AIML’s attorney, Tom Tavares Finson, suggested that its founders – Robert and Peter Chin – could take legal action against the regulatory agency.
He accused the FID of attempting to “conflate issues by raising the fact that, as part of a plea arrangement, AFL pleaded guilty to minor regulatory breaches.”
Tavares Finson asserted that several entities were guilty of the same regulatory breaches and were granted a waiver shortly after the AFL issue, to avoid being held accountable.
“Important to note that AFL and AIML are separate entities. The baseless POCA (Proceeds of Crime Act) charges are what were fatal to the operations of AIML under the leadership of its founders. The FID statement only serves to compound the injustice meted out to AIML and does not acknowledge the grave error in the conduct of the FID, FSC (Financial Services Commission) and the BOJ (Bank of Jamaica),” the attorney said.
“Given the collapse of the POCA case against AIML due to wholly unreasonable and baseless FID/FSC/BOJ overreach, the entity’s founders reserve the right to take legal action to recoup losses incurred.”