In August of 2009 – the Financial Intelligence Unit put a freeze on 22 bank accounts owned by Fultec and Omni Companies in which Dean Fuller is the principal. The FIU did it because Fuller’s Omni Networks was the master agent for Moneygram – and one of the Moneygram agents was implicated in a major money laundering investigation. In November the Supreme Court ordered that the freeze should continue because there was, “a reasonable cause to believe...that the accounts in the banks are tainted in relation to the offence of money laundering.”
Well, the Court of Appeals does not share that opinion. The big news coming out of the court today is that the panel of judges have set aside an earlier injunction which froze hundreds of thousands of dollars belonging to Omni Networks and Fultec Systems respectively. Essentially, the ruling means that the owner/manager of the companies, Dean Fuller, once again has unlimited access to the more than six hundred thousand dollars deposited in twenty-two accounts held in five different banks.
This morning, Fuller’s attorney Senior Counsel Eamon Courtenay argued that the FIU had in fact failed to link the money to any crime. In response, one of the FIU’s three attorneys, Tricia Pitts-Anderson, contended that the monies were tainted because they arose out of a relationship between Omni Networks and another company, Money Exchange International Limited. That relationship, said Anderson, was in fact a conspiracy to commit the offence of money laundering and fraud. However during much back and forth between Anderson and the judges, their Lordships were not convinced that the evidence pointed to criminal activity.
President of the Court Justice Elliott Mottley maintained to Anderson, “All you are saying may be true but you have to prove it. None of your affidavits support the grounds you have stated on your feet.” With that, the Judges set aside the decision of Justice Legall and discharged the injunction. The Court has also ordered costs to Omni Networks and Fultec for both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court.
The FIU took today’s developments in stride, saying they are now focussing on the criminal side of the case, that is prosecuting Fuller for laundering six point five million dollars between October 2007 and January 2009. Fuller’s Omni Networks was the master agent for Moneygram in Belize.
The FIU says the company shared in commissions on millions of dollars of fraudulent transactions carried out by Money Exchange International Limited, the parent company for the Moneygram agency run by the Coye family. Fuller has denied the charges and has even claimed that he lost money on the Moneygram business. The preliminary inquiry of the money laundering case against Omni Networks is set for March 26th.
The FIU is being represented by attorneys Antoinette Moore, Tricia Pitts Anderson and Mikhail Arguelles while Fuller’s companies are defended by Courtenay and Ashanti Arthurs Martin.
