A former Inspector General of Police (IGP) and Chairman of the Police Service Commission, Dr. Solomon Arase, has called on all security agencies to close ranks in order to tackle the endemic financial crime that is threatening the economy of the nation.
Dr. Arase, who 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, noted that attainment of an enhanced technical, intellectual, and professional capacity is needed to understand the complex trails of financial crimes.
Speaking at the annual lecture and award ceremony of the Crime Reporters Association of Nigeria (CRAN) in Lagos, Arase stressed the need for all security agencies to equip themselves with the requisite capacity that will enable them to identify pieces of technically-aided evidence of prosecutorial value that could engender the successful prosecution of criminals.
Represented by the Assistant Inspector General of Police Force Criminal Intelligence and Investigation Department (FCIID), Lagos annex, AIG Idowu Owohunwa, he said, “The questions here, however, are:
Does 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 to dealing with this threat, including maximizing the tools of the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU)?
In order to strengthen financial crime safeguards and the fraud alarm system, particularly by corporate players and public agencies, Dr. Arase called for pathways to bridge 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.
