Security Agencies Must Close Ranks to Tackle Financial Crimes – Arase

Matilda Omonaiye/

The Chairman, Police Service Commission, Dr. Solomon Arase, has called on security agencies to close ranks in order to tackle the endemic financial crimes threatening the economy of the nation.

Dr  Arase, a former Inspector General of Police, also queried the institutional capacity of the national security and intelligence community to professionally detect, prevent and deploy modern investigative tools towards dissecting the criminal signatures of fraudsters. He said that the attainment of an enhanced technical, intellectual and professional capacity was needed to understand the complex trails of financial crimes.

Speaking at the annual lecture and award ceremony of Crime Reporters Association of Nigeria (CRAN) in Lagos Arase stressed the need for all security agencies to equip themselves with requisite capacity that would enable them identify pieces of technically-aided evidence of prosecutorial value that could engender the successful prosecution of the criminals.

Represented by the Assistant Inspector General of Police in charge of the Force Criminal Intelligence and Investigations Department (FCIID), Lagos annex, AIG Idowu Owohunwa, Arase said, “The questions here, however, are: Do the national security and intelligence community have the institutional capacity to professionally detect, prevent, and deploy modern investigative tools towards dissecting the criminal signatures of these fraudsters, and identifying pieces of technically-aided evidence of prosecutorial value that could engender the successful prosecution of the criminals?

“Have the nation’s security institutions built strong inter-agency synergy that could stimulate a coordinated and symbiotic approach in dealing with this threat including maximizing the tools of the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU)?”

In order to strengthen financial crimes safeguards and fraud alarm system, particularly, by corporate players and public agencies, Dr. Arase called for pathways to bridging the capacity gap of the security agencies in relation to understanding the complex dynamics and highly technical field of financial crimes.

He also suggested closing the capacity gap of security agencies in unraveling the constantly advancing modus operandi, trends, and patterns of financial crime networks towards bringing them to deserved justice amongst others.