A recently announced federal law enforcement agency dedicated to investigating financial crimes will take years to set up, and to be effective, the Ottawa-headquartered force will need to have a presence in places like B.C., say policing experts.
The new Financial Crimes Agency will be allowed to create offices outside of its head office, under legislation introduced at the end of April, but it’s unclear if that will happen.
The new agency is meant to investigate things like cross-border money laundering, a hot-button issue in B.C. in the past decade and the subject of several government reports and inquiries.
“You can’t investigate this stuff from a distance,” said Peter German, the author of two B.C. government reports on money laundering and a former deputy commissioner of the RCMP.
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