The National Criminal Intelligence Service has announced record suspicious financial transaction disclosures for the year 2000.
NCIS has announced record suspicious financial transaction disclosures for the year 2000. During 2000, a total of 18,408 disclosures were made to NCIS Economic Crime Unit, an increase of nearly 27 per cent over the previous year’s figure of 14,500 for 1999. In 1998 the figure was 14,129. Following the attack on New York’s World Trade Centre, NCIS was given a lead role in the economic war against terrorism with the creation of a new Terrorist Finance Team (TFT) within its Economic Crime Unit. The unit allows the link between organised crime and terrorism to be analysed for the first time and is playing a key part of the UK strategy to combat terrorism. It has a multi-agency background, and has counter-terrorist and financial intelligence analysis expertise. Most of the unit’s intelligence is expected to be taken from the tens of thousands of suspicious transaction reports (STRs) made to NCIS by UK financial institutions each year. The TFT will examine STRs for possible terrorist connections, analyse available data and produce financial intelligence packages which can be passed for investigation by appropriate partner agencies. Also, the TFT’s position within the ECU will enable it to identify linkages between terrorism and other financing, and to generate information about other serious financial crime. See www.ncis.co.uk.
