The FIU-NDEA case continues: Barclays Bank says all due diligence were done |07 September 2017

The heads of Barclays Bank (Seychelles) Ltd were thrust into the limelight yesterday in yet another one of the National Assembly’s Finance and Public Accounts Committee (FPAC) enquiry sessions.

The managing director of Barclays Johan Van Schalkwyk, the chairman of the Barclays board Jean Weeling-Lee as well as the bank’s director of transactional banking services Karl Sieber were called upon by the committee to clarify the bank’s position regarding certain irregular bank transactions, according to the FPAC.

The session in particular referred to the recurrent transfers of substantial amounts of money originating from entities of the government of Seychelles into a Barclays Euro account belonging to a company registered in Mauritius, namely Solas Beo Inc. The payments were approved by the Ministry of Finance.

Revealed in the Auditor General’s report released in May of this year, these payments of up to R90 million spanned from 2009 to 2015, and have been claimed to be expenditures for consultancy services provided by the above companies to the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) and the National Drug Enforcement Agency (NDEA).

And yet further probing by the FPAC in other separate enquiries unveiled no concrete evidence of any such services.

According to the chairperson of the FPAC, Wavel Ramkalawan, if this is so then the payments were more or less illegal and, moreover, these companies have not provided Seychellois taxpayers with value for their money.

The beneficiaries of the accounts, at that time, happened to be Declan Barber and Niall Scully ‒ the two Irish who were in charge of the FIU and NDEA respectively.

The FPAC was curious to know why a Suspicious Transaction Report (STR) was not triggered when regular quarterly payments of around 100,000 euros or so were deposited to an account whose signatories were the same persons who were heading the governmental institutions performing the payments.

To this Mr Sieber replied: “We often facilitate business between entities and companies where we do have directors or beneficiaries who are from both sides; so it’s not an unusual situation.”

He also stated that according to their policies a company who chooses to have an account with Barclays is obliged to state the nature of their business and hence there is no need for an STR when transactions fall in line with the stated nature of business.

“An STR would occur when, for instance, a company whose nature of business is mainly exporting to China suddenly receives suspicious transactions from the United States,” elaborated Mr Sieber.

If audiences watching the live stream of the session on Facebook were expecting more shocking revelations, they were to be sorely disappointed when Mr Van Schalkwyk emphasised that the bank could only reply in general and not in relation to any specific Barclays account holder. This is in compliance with Section 49 of the Financial Institutions Act restricting the disclosure of a customer’s information to any person or body except for the Central Bank of Seychelles (CBS) or through a court order request.

Barclays also gave further details on how a normal, typical banking transaction is processed and clarified that as one of the most compliant banks in Seychelles it always complies with these processes and regulations.

“All due diligence were done,” they kept repeating.

Furthermore they stated that at no point in time has a financial regulator such as the CBS or FIU ever coerced them to expedite or ease a banking transaction.

Once all of the hearing sessions in regards to the NDEA-FIU case are completed a report will be drafted by the FPAC and submitted to the National Assembly.

The Barclays officials before the FPAC yesterday