The island’s top agencies tasked with deterring, investigating, and prosecuting financial crimes say their forensic capabilities and expert sleuths are outmatching criminals who have been trying to utilise “ingenious ways” to siphon off and hide monies and assets.

The successes, the law enforces say, have led to many jaw-dropping finds translating to hundreds of millions of dollars for State coffers.

According to Colonel Desmond Edwards, director general of the Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency (MOCA), the entities, which have undergone a revolution in recent years, are now significantly more adept at ferreting out evidence and investigating financial crimes, a fact that felons have recognised.

“The criminals are very much aware, which is why they come up with all kinds of seemingly ingenious ways of hiding their assets… even using relatives who are not aware. And that is what prompted us at MOCA certainly to build financial forensic capabilities, because we have found that unless we have these experts who can follow the money, basically, we really are not going to be as effective as we ought to be. So we have built that capacity, and collectively — ourselves, the Financial Investigations Division (FID), and other agencies as well — have become better at going after them, following the money,” Edwards told this week’s Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange.

Edwards, who appeared alongside Dennis Chung, chief technical director of the FID, and other officials from both entities, said MOCA, over the last 10 years, “has evolved”, focused on building its cyber forensic capabilities and financial forensics to stay ahead of criminal enterprises while working hand in hand with other law enforcement units.

“The partnership we have and enjoy for a number of years now is that MOCA tends to lead on the criminal investigations, and FID, using the same body of evidence, will lead on the asset recovery. So a lot of the assets that FID pursues are as a result of investigations that MOCA have commenced and then brought them in as part [of our investigation]. A good example would be the Manchester Parish Council [fraud] case, where we commenced that investigation [and] when we realised the extent of the properties that this individual had acquired, FID was brought on board and they pursued, first of all, the restraint of and ultimately the forfeiture of those properties, while we pursued the criminal investigation. So it’s a division of labour, basically. So we have one comprehensive approach, but we focus on some aspects of it and FID on others,” Edwards told editors and reporters.

According to Chung, the intensity of those efforts and investments are creating jitters in the criminal underworld.

“I can tell you, and I say it all the while, the financial investigators, the forensic investigators at FID and MOCA are top of the line. So we find some assets that people think we will not find. When we finish tracing, they are surprised,” Chung told the Monday Exchange.

“In fact, regularly we have lawyers coming to us on behalf of the people trying to negotiate and say, ‘Boy, you can’t take another approach?’ We say, ‘No, you commit the crime, you’re going to pay the money. If it is illicit gains, we are going to get the money from those illicit gains.’ And we have been very successful in that regard. For the past three weeks, two lawyers have come to us trying to negotiate and we tell them ‘No’,” Chung disclosed.

According to Nigel Parke, senior director Legal and Prosecutorial Services Unit, MOCA, the most common method weaponised by criminals has been neutralised.

“The most popular method is to register assets in the names of other people. So our task — in line with the Companies Act being amended, so beneficial ownership is no longer a requirement — we try to find who are the beneficial owners of the assets. And it usually is eventually not too hard to deduce, because you look at the ability of the person to acquire the asset through legitimate means. And if you can’t find that, then you work out who is the likely owner. And it’s just about following the paper, following the trail. But there are a number of different methodologies,” Parke stated.

According to Chung, there is no doubt as to whether the work of the entities have so far paid off.

“We’ve also been working with various law enforcement agencies and also through our multilateral partner agreements in terms of asset recovery through POCA (Proceeds of Crime Act). We have been very active under that in terms of ensuring that we are in a position even before the case is tried,” Chung said.

As in other years, he said 2025 saw “significant” recoveries.

“In 2025 we actually seized $164.1 million in cash and a significant amount of assets. In assets we had the courts ordering confiscations exceeding $33 million and US$35,000 and we have a lot of other assets we are going after,” Chung noted.

He said while much might not be said in the public domain about the investigations being undertaken by the entity, which is duty-bound to “observe citizens’ rights”, the number of cases before the courts are telling.

“We do not reveal anything about cases until someone is charged, because we have to respect the rights of citizens and everyone is [presumed] innocent. And even after you’re charged, [we] have to reveal evidence for us to make some announcement about it, because it is in the public interest at that time. So there’s a lot of things we’ve been doing, a lot of significant things we’ve been doing. So in the courts now, it is about tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that we are looking at right now. But it has to go through the court process,” Chung stated.

Edwards, in the meantime, said 2025 for MOCA was also “significantly busy”.

“We had a total of 33 fairly significant operations. We did 35 arrests and we had 30 persons charged. And last year we also had 11 convictions. Obviously those convictions were from cases that were already going through the courts,” he said.