Police panel wants financial, cyber crimes on federal list

Advocating the categorisation of financial frauds and cyber terrorism as federal crimes, besides a few other offences, the BPR&D in its affidavit said: “A financial fraud involving a series of transactions or where investigation and prosecution are likely to require specialised knowledge of financial market conditions or which require legal, financial, investment and investigative skills or even those which appear complex to the regulators, banks or capital markets” have to designated as ones which have national or even international ramifications.

Such frauds involving public money was “an issue of good governance” and deeply impact “economic integration”, so while pushing such crimes to be treated as federal, the BPR&D also recommended a designated federal agency to investigate all such offences.

It added that the federal agency will have the required level of the expertise considering the “capacity deficit” and “credibility deficit” of the state police to investigate crimes of a serious nature.

The said response formed part of the court’s directions in the case of police reforms where suggestions were sought on whether investigation of offences with trans-national links could be entrusted to the CBI or any other federal agency.

The BPR&D said the specialised agency would have “concurrent jurisdiction” with the state police in dealing with these offences. This was in line with the recommendations of the Soli Sorabjee Committee and the NHRC.

The BPRD agreed with the Malimath Committee that waging war against the nation, terrorism, hijacking, arms and drug trafficking, espionage and crimes targeting national infrastructure should be considered federal, but wanted some more offences to be added to the list like offences under the Atomic Energy Act, 1962, arms or explosives running and organised crime.

According to BPR&D, “The rapidity ... of adoption of new technologies and innovative ... planning and execution of cross-border crimes by organised crime-terrorist nexus has outpaced the speed with which law enforcement agencies at the state level have been able to ‘modernise’ .”