Alliance Investment Management cleared of POCA charges
Alliance Investment Management Limited has been cleared of all Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) charges.
The 17 charges were dismissed Thursday afternoon when Senior Parish Court Judge Chester Crooks upheld a no-case submission filed by defence attorneys, King’s Counsel Tom Tavares-Finson and Sean-Christopher Castle.
“I don’t find that the case against AIML passes the threshold of going beyond a no-case submission. All 17 charges are dismissed,” Crooks said.
The charges had resulted in AIML’s former principals, Robert and Peter Chin, being hauled before the Kingston and St Andrew Parish Court.
AIML was charged with failure to file threshold transaction reports in breach of Section 3 (1) of the Act.
The company was accused of failing to file cash transactions of, or exceeding US$15,000 or its equivalent in any other currency to the designated authority, which is the chief technical director of the FID.
Tavares Finson, in an interview with journalists after the ruling, insisted that his clients had complied with the law.
“The situation is that all 17 charges have been dismissed. We had maintained from the very start that in fact threshold transaction reports were filed. The FID indicated they were not filed because they could not find them.
“In fact, we presented to the court evidence that there reports were in fact filed with the FID and it is the incompetence of the FID which led to the charges being laid against this company. It is the incompetence of the FID which had caused the FID to sell their business. This is a serious matter and it has serious repercussions for the financial sector,” Tavares Finson said.
The sanctions led to the Chin brothers being forced to shut down the organisation and abandon plans to list sections of the Alliance operations on the Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE).
AIML’s securities portfolios were eventually bought by Sagicor Jamaica Limited in August 2022.