Money laundering case starts with 85 statements
The preliminary inquiry into the Money Laundering case of Money Gram Director, Melonie Coye, started today in the Magistrate’s Court. Prosecutor for the Financial Intelligence Unit, Antoinette Moore, submitted eighty five statements against the Coye family to Magistrate Kathleen Lewis. A total of five members of the Coye family are charged with Money Laundering. By the end of today, the F.I.U. team could not close their case as Coye’s Attorney, Dickie Bradley, ended the day still making submissions. The eighty five statements put forward by the F.I.U., included those of CIB Chief, and Assistant Superintendent Julio Valdez; F.I.U. Personnel, Sergeant Bernard Reyes and others including alleged victims have since told the F.I.U. that while their names appeared on money gram receipts through the use of their driver’s license they never received money and never conducted any business with the money gram office. Those names include well-known individuals in society such as Appeals Court Justice Manuel Sosa; John Harris Hertular; Nestor Vasquez; Managing Director of Alliance Bank, Steve Duncan and Magistrate Sharon Frazer. But the most controversial witness that Bradley made a very lengthy submission on was the statements of Shawn Oliver. According to Bradley, Oliver is the witness who alerted the F.I.U. to irregularities and illegal activities at Money Gram International. In one statement dated December twenty ninth, 2008, she initially told them that she had seen Melonie Coye send over a hundred and seventy four thousand U.S. dollars to Costa Rica. In her second statement on May nineteenth, 2009, Oliver stated that Money Gram was using driver’s licenses to receive money in Belize. But Bradley submitted that there is no evidence that any such transfers occurred. He asked Magistrate Lewis to discharge the case.
Dickie Bradley, Attorney for Coye Family
“Eighty-six items of exhibit were tendered this morning by the three attorneys for the F.I.U. by Trecia Pitts, Antoinette Moore and Michael Arguelles. Myself, Anthony Sylvestre and Arthur Saldivar represent different of the defendants. The procedure is that when the FIU, as prosecutors, tender the evidence, the Indictable Procedure Act allows us, if there are grounds, to challenge the evidence that it does not disclose sufficient information for the case to be sent up to the Supreme Court as an indictable case. What has taken place this morning is that we have been making submissions, going through the statements to show that unlike the Builders Hardware in Belmopan who have both quantity and quality, that the evidence is mainly quantity but there is no quality. There is a pima facie case to sent the matter for trial a the Supreme Court. There is really only one piece of evidence. It comes from Shawn Oliver who worked at Omni, who has been charged for money laundering, who says she worked at the Central Bank now we look at the statement, who incredibly is now working at MoneyGram under new management. She is the only employee that says something had been going wrong. What has been going wrong? She says that everyday, MoneyGram had been sending one hundred and seventy-four thousand U.S. dollars out of the country to Costa Rica. That is something for somebody to say. As we pointed out to the trial magistrate for the preliminary inquiry, there has been not one single piece of evidence from any commercial bank or the Central Bank or anywhere to substantiate such an incredible piece of allegation, which we say is totally false. There is no evidence from Central Bank or any commercial bank, there is not even an application for foreign exchange for that amount of money. I am suggesting to the magistrate nobody can send out that large amount of money just walking in and getting a permit. This is really taking people for fools. You cannot say that because a person has a large amount of money, that they are a criminal.”
The P.I. continues on November third.
