Understanding Transnational Organized Crime and crime based illicit financial flows.

Transnational Organized crime takes many forms and is constantly evolving. the groups and networks involved  are fluid, the channels used to traffic one commodity will be the same channels used to smuggle in the other. 

It is or this reason that we had a three-day training from to pound more on TOCs and IFFs from Friday may 26th May, Monday May the 29th to  Tuesday May the 30th. The facilitators of this training were

·         Eric Guiterez-a PhD holder from Erasmus University Rotterdam for his dissertation “Resilience and Interdependency: In Opium and Coca Commodity Chains”.

·         Andrew Tennant: Currently a director of Gentium UK Ltd. He has over 23 years’ experience in working with law enforcement, dealing with organized crime and recovery management.

·         Purity Mukami who is a data journalist based in Nairobi. She has worked with international media outlets including the UK based Finance covered, the BBC Eye of Africa.

 

The objectives of this training were the following:

·          To provide participants with a comprehensive introduction to understanding TOCs and their impact on society, its economy and security.

·         To Equip participants with knowledge about IFFs and techniques used by money to launder money acquired through criminal activities.

·         To provide participants with practical knowledge and skills required for investigating TOCs and crime based IFFs.

Mr. Eric Guitierez took the group through a detailed explanation of understanding what TOCs really are, its origin or roots, what would qualify to be categorized as a TOC while citing examples from different parts of the world, impacts of TOCs and a global outreach to curb down TOCs.

Some of the impacts included tax evasion, conflict, terrorism, cartels, human trafficking, wildlife trafficking among others. Civil society organizations are an example of what society and the world at large is doing as a step to curbing down TOCs.

On day 2 of the training the group was supposed to learn about illicit financial flows and money laundering but unfortunately Mr. Andrew Tennant the facilitator of the day was not able to make it and sent in his apologies. The group did a personal research about the different types of IFFs, money laundering, emerging trends on such as crypto currencies and ownership of virtual assets and the role of financial institutions in combating money laundering.

Ms Purity Mukami facilitated the third day of the training. She took the team through the investigative techniques and tools used in TOC investigations such as open source intelligence, how to conduct interviews, how to protect one’s data sources, the legal frameworks and international conventions supporting investigations.

On this three-day interactive training the team was able to give personal accounts and experiences, different views and thoughts, ideas about TOCs and IFFs. They were able to learn that data can also be shared numerically and that has worked as a technique of source protection. Most crime offenders, money launderers may not know how to interpret numerical data.


Prima Birungi 

Project Assistant IAIF

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