New service to step up fight against crime |09 May 2012

By simply sending a text message to a certain number, an authorised person will get a reply comprising a vehicle’s details, which includes vehicle ownership, road license expiry date, colour, make, model and address of the owner.

The service is an initiative of the Seychelles Licensing Authority (SLA) in collaboration with the Department of Information Communication Technology (DICT).

The new service, which was launched yesterday at the Ministry of Finance, will directly benefit a number of key agencies in Seychelles. These include the police, the Seychelles Revenue Commission, the Fair Trading Commission and the Financial Investigation Unit.

Present at the launch ceremony yesterday were the Minister for Finance, Trade & Investment Pierre Laporte, principal secretary Steve Fanny, SLA chief executive Marise Berlouis and representatives of the DICT and the police department.

The DICT director for software standard and research, Gerard Gill, gave a presentation where he explained that a person authorised to use the service, in line with the Data Protection Act – such as a police officer or NDEA agent – can simply send a text message to 9601 with the plate number of the vehicle in question and in the space of a minute will receive all available information on the vehicle.

Mrs Berlouis said very often when officers are working after-hours, it takes them a while to identify the ownership details of vehicles which may have been engaged in crime or whose drivers and occupants have been showing suspicious behaviours. 

“The service is being made available to the police and the NDEA in order to help them in their fight against drugs and criminality,” she said.

“Since the beginning of the year, the SLA in partnership with the DICT has started a project which will lead to the full digitalisation of the SLA by September 2012. This will include full computerisation of the data and records and automated processing of applications through its website which was launched in January,” Mrs Berlouis said.

Minister Laporte, who officially launched the service, said he hopes it will be used appropriately and make law-enforcement agencies more efficient.

Mrs Berlouis said the SLA has furthermore already put in place a software for mechanised allocation of registration numbers, so that when a vehicle is registered, a vacant number is automatically allocated.

Numbers which are not in use for two years will automatically be put as vacant numbers in the system and allocated automatically to new vehicles.