Presentations and Speeches

Introductory Remarks by FINTRAC Director Horst Intscher at the Canadian Police College Workshop on Organized Crime and Money Laundering

Ottawa
Sunday, November 17, 2002

Welcome participants in this workshop on the New Criminal World Order, and thanks to Toni Murray for inviting FINTRAC to participate in mounting it.

• The focus of your program is on organized crime and terrorism and the role of money in such activities
  
  
• Money is a critical ingredient in both, and money is normally the sole purpose for engaging in organized criminal activity.
  
  
• As you will hear throughout this week, organized criminal activity is enormous in scope, and profits from it are nothing short of staggering. This in turn creates a gigantic need for those groups and individuals to find ways of hiding their profits from the prying eyes of law enforcement agencies and governments. The process of hiding the criminal origins of money is what is referred to as money laundering.
  
  
• In 1998, the International Monetary Fund estimated that, world wide, money laundering annually amounted to between 2% and 5% of global Gross Domestic Product, that is the value of all goods and services produced on the entire planet in one year. In todays terms, that means that money laundering, globally, amounts to between US$ 600 billion and US$ 1.5 TRILLION! There are only 6 or 7 countries in the world whose GDPs reach US$1.5 trillion.
  
  
• Criminal profits of that magnitude have extraordinary destabilising potential. The potential for corruption is enormous, and entire societies can be destablised by the corruption arising from organized criminal activity. The potential for economic dislocation is also significant, as criminal (and untaxed) profits make for profoundly unfair competition in marketplaces. Moreover, in some instances, sizeable segments of the work force can become dependent on such activity, making it even more difficult for governments to address the underlying problem. And, finally, the easy availability of criminal profits provides the wherewithall to finance further, more audacious, and more corrosive criminal activity, and to hire the best legal and accounting talent to protect the perpetrators and their profits.
  
  
• In recent years, terrorism has also become a major concern for most countries of the world. While these activities are not normally carried out for profit, their destabilising impact on societies is as great as, or even greater than, the impact of organized crime.
  
  
• Mounting terrorist activities requires money, and globalized, concerted and coordinated terrorist activity requires quite a lot of money. Increasingly, we see that funding for such activity comes from criminal acitivities, as well as from other traditional sources such as community fund raising and/or sponsorship by foreign governmental and non-governmental bodies.
  
  
• How do we tackle these problems? Governments and law enforcement agencies everywhere have come to realize that it is not enough to target the perpetrators and put them behind bars. We now understand that if we hope to make a serious dent on the problem, we have to be able to find and seize criminal profits and disrupt the funding channels for criminal and terrorist activity. This has led to new enforcement approaches and a greater reliance on multi jurisdictional cooperation and on multi-disciplinary attacks on major crime and terrorism targets.
  
  
• One of the essential ingredients of any effective attack on organized crime is good intelligence. And since we are now going after not only the criminals and terrorists, but also their money, there is a strong requirement for good financial intelligence. During the past decade, more and more governments have come to recognize the importance of ensuring the availability of good financial intelligence. They have passed legislation requiring the mandatory reporting of certain kinds of financial transaction information. And, they have created centralized financial intelligence units to receive that information, to analyze it and to ensure that high quality financial intelligence is passed to criminal investigators to facilitate their investigations and prosecutions of organized criminals and terrorists.
  
  
• FINTRAC, the agency of which I am pleased to be the Director, is Canadas financial intelligence unit (FIU). Our mission is to provide high quality financial intelligence to law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies to facilitate the investigation or prosecution of organized crime and terrorism. I understand that one of my staff, Gary Nichols, the head of our Toronto office, and a former member of the RCMP, will be making a presentation on FINTRAC later this week. He will provide you with a detailed overview of our mandate and how we go about our business. I understand also that he will be able to provide you with copies of our first annual report, which was tabled about 10 days ago.
  
  
• All of you are here today because you are committed, in your various capacities, to combatting organized crime and terrorist activity. It is clear that this presents daunting challenges, but your fellow citizens, your co-workers, your neighbours and your spouses and children depend on you to engage in this campaign. Their future well-being will be greatly enhanced by your successes.
  
  
• My job, and the job of FINTRAC, is to try to make your job easier and more effective. We exist for only one purpose, and that is to provide high quality financial intelligence to law enforcement. We succeed if you succeed.
  
  
• This workshop is unique because it provides the rare opportunity to bring together those of us in the law enforcement and intelligence communities with those in the private sector - to learn and to share our knowledge and experience. It is also symbolic of the kind of cooperation and collaboration that is required and will be required for us, collectively, to combat organized crime and terrorism.
  
  
• I wish you great success over the coming week, and I am confident that this workshop will accomplish its objectives - each of you will leave with a better understanding of the underlying problems and how to work together to address them. Most importantly, you will forge new relationships and you will know that you are not alone in confronting the daunting challenges that face us all.
  
  
• Again, many thanks to Toni Murray and the College for inviting FINTRAC to involve itself in this initiative. We are very proud to be your partner and we look forward to working with the college and with all of you in the future.