Local magistrates and prosecutors will join their counterparts in Trinidad and Tobago for a one-day workshop that will focus on the proceeds of crime and money laundering. This follows a highly successful Eastern Caribbean Judicial conference held in December last year which targeted judges and magistrates. The workshop will be held today.
Acting Chief Magistrate Priya Sewnarine Beharry, and Magistrates Hazel Octave Hamilton and Adela Nagamootoo, along with the Director of Public Prosecutions Mrs. Shalimar Ali-Hack, Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Jo-Ann Barlow and Senior State Counsel Sonia Joseph will be representing Guyana.
The aim of the workshop is to help in the prevention and disruption of organised crime, including drug trafficking, money laundering and firearms offences.  Participants will be reviewing a proposed prosecutorial code which will offer a way forward in harnessing ‘Best Practice’ for police and prosecutors in the fight against crime.
The Trinidad workshop is the second of three such workshops the British High Commissions of Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados, with additional support from the Government of Canada, will be holding across the Caribbean. The first, in Antigua yesterday was for magistrates and prosecutors from that island, Dominica, St Kitts and Nevis, and from the British Overseas Territories in the Region. The third workshop will be held in Barbados tomorrow, and will bring together participants from Barbados, Grenada, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines.
The workshops will be facilitated by Mark Sutherland Williams, a London-based proceeds of crime and asset recovery law specialist. Williams has appeared in hundreds of confiscation, condemnation, asset recovery and cash seizure cases as Counsel in the last 15 years. He is the co-author of one of the main practitioner texts on asset forfeiture, “The Proceeds of Crime: Law and Practice of Restraint, Confiscation, Condemnation and Forfeiture”.
He regularly appears in high profile cases relating to all aspects of the law of civil recovery and confiscation, and was junior counsel in the recent House of Lords cases of Capewell, Briggs-Price and Islam.
Oliver Powell, also a UK barrister, will give presentations and provide training on money laundering offences, cash seizures, confiscation and civil forfeiture.
From the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, Dan Suter, currently Criminal Justice Adviser for the British Government in the Eastern Caribbean, will also be in attendance at the Antigua and Barbados events giving presentations and working sessions on the proposed prosecutorial code.