In August, the Financial Intelligence Unit got a court order to freeze all
bank accounts connected to dean fuller and his various companies, principally
omni networks and Fultec Systems. That’s a total of 24 different bank
accounts spread across five different banks – and according to the FIU,
the total deposits amount to millions of dollars.
The freeze was requested because the FIU believed that monies in those accounts
were “tainted due to money laundering.” The taint, argues the FIU
came from Omni’s Business relationship with Money Exchange International
Limited, the parent company for the Moneygram Agency run by the Coye family.
Fuller was the Managing Director for Omni which was the master agent for Moneygram
in Belize.
But Fuller said there was no taint, the FIU had it all wrong and instead of
banking millions of dollars in commission receipts, he claimed that omni actually
lost money on the Moneygram Agency. And that’s why Fuller secured attorneys
Eamon Courtenay and Ashanti Arthurs martin to ask the Supreme Court to lift
the freeze on his 24 accounts. They presented arguments to the court that eight
point three million dollars that was deposited in a single account at the Belize
Bank in 2007 was not the result of money generated from Moneygram.
Justice Oswell Legall considered arguments from both sides, with the FIU represented
by Antoinette Moore, Tricia Pitts Anderson and Mikhail Argüelles. In a
judgment issued this afternoon, Justice Legall rejected the arguments made by
Fuller’s attorneys. He found that, “there is a reasonable cause
to believe...that the accounts in the banks are tainted in relation to the offence
of money laundering and that a forfeited order may be made in respect of the
moneys in the accounts, if there is a conviction in the criminal charges.”
With that finding, the court extended the freezing of all accounts associated
with Fuller, Omni and Fultec Systems, with the exception of two accounts containing
funds belonging to Fuller’s mother. The court also permitted Fuller to
make withdrawals of eight thousand dollars monthly from one account to cover
living expenses.
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