Description
The project is of great importance as it aims to protect society from financial crime, by increasing citizen security through improvement of the capacity and efficiency of cooperation between law enforcement authorities and Financial Intelligence Units (FIU) in the Donor states and Cyprus and at international level, in order to prevent and combat cross-border and organised crime and in particular money laundering and terrorist financing. The overall objective is to automate the analysis and investigation procedure of MOKAS, by implementing an IT system for supporting MOKAS’ core activities. These challenges were addressed by sharing know-how the Cyprus FIU to Norway, Finland, Netherlands FIUs and UNODC. MOKAS’ enhanced capabilities will benefit various target groups, including the judicial authorities, actors of the judiciary such as the Police, customs and prosecution offices and the public in general through the protection of their economic interests.
Summary of project results
MOKAS, was operating mainly on a manual basis. The IT system did not offer automated identification of correlations between data, information, suspects etc and did not offer the desirable security level. Thus, there was the need to increase productivity through reduction of the time needed for the processes from information collection until investigation and prosecution.All the above together with the ever increasing volume of data and cases received, created a bottleneck phenomenon with a lot of input but less output and they adversely affected the Unit's core business. The Unit recognizing this bottleneck phenomenon and taking into account the complexity of the investigations and analysis carried out, decided to propose this Project. The overall objective of the Project was to automate the analysis and investigation procedure of MOKAS by implementing an IT system for supporting MOKAS core activities. This overall objective was fully achieved, by the acquisition and implementation of goAML, that is an intelligence analysis system, which was specifically designed to meet the data collection, management, financial analysis, document management, workflow and statistical needs of FIUs. This new system installed in MOKAS, has and will continue to have in the foreseeable future a direct effect on the effectiveness and efficiency of core businesses of MOKAS and as a consequence better results are achieved in relation to the fight against organized crime and financial crimes which have direct effect on the society. In relation to economic sustainability, activities, user licenses and support fees after the end of the project will be financed by the National Budget of the Government of the Republic of Cyprus. The outputs (project results/deliverables) of the Project are the following: 1. Shared know-how between the FIUs of Cyprus, Norway, Finland, Netherlands and UNODC. 2. Installed the necessary hardware. 3. goAML application customised and installed. 4. organised a conference to inform and exchange views with stakeholders about the capabilities of the new IT system. 5.Publicity material was produced and disseminated to all stakeholders a 6.MOKAS personnel was trained on goAML application and Law Enforcement officers were trained on organized crime including money laundering and terrorism financing.
Summary of bilateral results