(Jamaica Observer) Chief Technical Director of the Financial Investigation Division (FID) Justin Felice says the snail’s pace of the justice system is causing a delay in the sale of over J$2 billion worth of seized assets.
The assets, he said, were seized from convicted felons and in order for them to be sold and the proceeds put into the consolidated fund, the Civil Court will have to hand down a ruling.
However, he said that some of the assets, including houses and motor vehicles, have been lying idle and deteriorating because of the length of time the cases take to be disposed of in the courts.
“Justice is very slow in Jamaica; we have to speed up the process,” said Felice, who gave the keynote address at an anti-fraud seminar at the Terra Nova Hotel in Kingston on Wednesday.
Felice said since the start of the year J$83 million of seized cash has been handed over to the Consolidated Fund but the seized assets were still in the custody of the FID.
He advocated for a change in the legislation which would allow the FID to apply to the court to be allowed to sell seized assets rather than be burdened with keeping and caring them.
“If I seize a man’s BMW, how do I maintain it in the same condition I seized it for three years? If we sell it and he wins the case then we give him back his money,” he said.
Felice mentioned a case involving the seizure of US$550,000 at the Norman Manley Airport that his division was forced to take before the Court of Appeal after a magistrate ruled that it could not be handed over to the State.
The money was found on two foreign nationals who had travelled from Pakistan to Dubai to South Africa to Brazil to Panama before coming to Jamaica with the intention of flying to Trinidad.
They were sent out of the country and investigations found that they were travelling on false passports, he said.
“The money is still in the account. A judge denied it. We had to take it to the Court of Appeal. It’s been 14 months and it’s not before the court (of Appeal),” Felice bemoaned, “Don’t we want to give the money to the State to fix our schools and develop the country?”
