D’ici fin avril - début mai, l’Integrity Reporting Services Agency entrera en opération. Cet organisme aura pour directeur le Britannique Paul Keyton, expert-comptable. Décrit comme un «homme solide» par le ministre de la Bonne gouvernance Roshi Bhadain, il a reçu ce week-end sa lettre de nomination de la présidence sur recommandation du Premier ministre.

Paul Keyton sera en poste d’ici trois semaines, sous contrat de trois ans. Ses fonctions sont définies sous laGood Governance and Integrity Reporting Act. Sa nomination a été rendue possible grâce à l’assistance du haut- commissariat britannique et du secrétariat du Commonwealth. Il en sera d’ailleurs de même pour la nomination du Chairperson de l’Integrity Reporting Board. Paul Keyton sera en charge d’une équipe de dix à quinze personnes, comprenant des Forensic Accountants, des auditeurs, des hommes de loi et d’anciens hauts fonctionnaires.

Dans une déclaration, le dimanche 10 avril, avant son départ pour l’Inde, où il va rencontrer le ministre des Finances Arun Jaitley, Roshi Bhadain a confié son enthousiasme face à la nomination de Paul Keyton. «C’est un bougre solide qui va traduire dans la réalité toute notre philosophie pour combattre l’unexplained wealth à Maurice.» Le ministre des Services financiers, de la Bonne gouvernance et des réformes institutionnelles explique que Paul Keyton, qui a une longue et riche expérience dans ce domaine, répondra à un Integrity Reporting Board, dont la présidence sera assurée par un ancien juge anglais, familier aux lois du Commonwealth.

«Je peux vous annoncer que le Chairperson sera connu d’ici une quinzaine de jours. Ce dernier répondra directement à la Cour suprême», a révélé Roshi Bhadain. En clair, l’équipe de Paul Keyton devra soumettre son dossier au Chairperson, qui le remettra, à son tour, à la Cour suprême. Ce sera alors au judiciaire de décider de la saisie ou non des avoirs. «Comme nous l’avons expliqué lors des débats sur le Good Governance and Integrity Reporting Bill, c’est une loi au civil qui va concerner la saisie des propriétés de ceux suspectés d’enrichissement illicite», précise-t-il.

Et pourquoi donc une loi au civil ? Les procédures iront ainsi beaucoup plus vite, avance le ministre.Et de faire ressortir, dans la foulée, que sous le code criminel, les autres procédures de saisie, sous l’Assets Recovery Act, vont demeurer sous l'égide du bureau du Directeur des poursuites publiques.

Roshi Bhadain s’enorgueillit du fait que la mise en place de l’Integrity Reporting Board traduit la volonté du gouvernement de sir Anerood Jugnauth dans son combat contre l’enrichissement illicite. Il s’agit de «nettoyer mais de manière professionnelle et de rendre leurs lettres de noblesse aux institutions».

CURRICULUM VITAE - PAUL KEYTON

BSc, ARCS (Physics)​ - Imperial College, London 1973​

Chartered Accountant - ​PwC London, 1978

Summary of Professional Experience

    •       Paul Keyton is a Chartered Accountant who, after qualification, spent eight years in the oil industry with Esso Petroleum in a variety of roles including supervising business unit, contractor and subsidiary company audits and system reviews in the UK, Western Europe, Scandinavia and Africa.

    •       He left the oil industry to become a full-time fraud investigator, moving on from support and research roles to hold senior positions in leading investigation consultancies and professional services firms in the UK, Switzerland, the USA and Africa.

    •       His work has centred on preventing, detecting and investigating frauds; detecting and investigating bribery and corruption; countering industrial espionage, theft of proprietary information and investigating monopolies, cartels, regulatory breaches and price-fixing. He has worked in virtually every sector including retail, construction, heavy engineering and power generation, oil and gas, banks and financial institutions and insurance, telecommunications, regulatory agencies and government departments.

    •       He has wide experience of planning, supervising and conducting complex enquiries and being operationally orientated, likes to “lead from the front”.  As a consultant, he has worked alongside clients’ staff as part of a multi-disciplined team or led investigations on their behalf or, in hostile environments, has worked entirely alone. He quickly identifies vulnerabilities and key issues and presents complex findings in a timely manner, clearly and concisely to clients and their legal advisers.

    •       In senior roles he has also had responsibility for producing and administering budgets, corporate governance, recruitment, training and career development.

    •       He is very results focussed and has organised and controlled successful recovery efforts including: proving complex foreign exchange and commodity trading frauds and their associated money laundering; retaining and instructing external resources (investigators, solicitors, counsel, expert witnesses); and presenting and refuting expert testimony. He is used to the demands of working to, and meeting, tight deadlines and in working on or supervising several cases simultaneously.

    •       As an experienced Forensic Accountant he has been called as an Expert Witness and his forensic work has been used to support successful financial recoveries. He has also given evidence in Court that led to the conviction of fraudsters.

    •       Paul has well-developed inter-personal and non-confrontational interviewing skills. He has trained members of professional bodies in the UK to identify and counter deception, both verbally and in writing and is very experienced in sympathetically but astutely debriefing whistle blowers and witnesses and in conducting admission-seeking interviews with hostile subjects; he has also represented clients in mediation hearings relating to miss-directed fraud investigations and abuse of process.

    •       Paul has given numerous seminars and conducted in-house training on detecting vulnerabilities to fraud, internal controls enhancement, fraud prevention, detection and investigation, interviewing and dealing with deception. His clients include the European Central Bank and major multinationals and seminar participants include internal auditors and investigators across multiple sectors and government fiscal investigators. He is a contributing author to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiner’s 2012 “Bribery and Corruption Casebook”.

Examples of Assignments

Independent Consultant October 2012 – to date

Major Oil and Petrochemicals Multinational

Consultant to Business Integrity Division for Europe, Africa, Middle East, Azerbaijan and Georgia responsible for investigations of fraud, bribery and corruption and conflicts of interest in a range of contracting environments. The assignment consisted of debriefing whistle blowers and gathering evidence.

Headed Business Integrity investigation of alleged contractual and other malpractice at a major oil terminal prior to its disinvestment (€500 million estimate). The work centred on the extent to which shortcomings in the management of major projects had affected the viability of the terminal as an operating unit.

Post Office

Appointed professional advisor to members of the JFSA (Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance) an industry group of Post Office franchisees who had their contracts terminated and were financially penalised and in some cases also prosecuted for fraud and false accounting.

The work centred on investigating and reporting on the impact of non-systemic faults in the Post Office’s online computer system which records transactions undertaken at over eleven thousand sub-post offices and has links to numerous other entities, including banks, utility companies and the DVLA. Sub-postmasters were held responsible for financial losses which they allege were wrongly generated by faults in the computer system.  The system and the Post Office’s treatment of its franchisees have been the focus of much scrutiny by MPs and the media and I was appointed to represent clients in subsequent mediation hearings. The work was in two phases August 2013- August 2014 (for investigating) and July 2015-December 2015 (for rebuttal of Post Office’s investigation reports and preparing Mediation Statements) Franchisees are now working on a class action against the Post Office.

Regulatory Body England and Wales

After tender I was appointed to help a team of experts to review investigations procedures, organisation and reporting lines, resources, training and the use of data mining in a Regulatory Body which had come under Parliamentary scrutiny for its failure to promptly and effectively police its sector.

Middle East

Investigating bribery and corruption and contractual disputes in a major waterfront development project in the Gulf; the principal contractor suspected that propriety information was being leaked to rivals by disaffected employees

Housing Association London

Appointed as a consultant to the Metropolitan Housing Trust which manages thirty-eight thousand homes and is investing £730 million over the next five years to build a further three thousand homes. The scope was to examine all areas of procurement to determine if there were vulnerabilities to fraud and identify improvements in procurement practices to enable the Trust to get better value for money from current and future suppliers.

Begbies Traynor Group Plc June 2008 – October 2012

Fraud in offshore and onshore liquidations: Discovering and investigating fraud and other malpractice  including: funds diversions, embezzlement, connected party transactions, corruption, falsifying board minutes, contracts, loan agreements, falsifying receivables, inventory fraud, foreign exchange violations, phoenix companies, tracing and interviewing former officers and employees.

Forensic accounting assignments: expert witness statements involving frauds – embezzlement, inventory fraud. Obtaining confessions of malpractice; Forensic analysis of FFA trading in cases involving settlement disputes; Acting as an expert witness for the prosecution in two criminal cases of fraud which I investigated and giving evidence in Court.

Shipping disputes, asset- tracing and maritime crisis consulting.

Independent Consultant May 2005 – June 2008

UK: Investigating frauds against a number of companies in a major FSA authorised group. As a result of criminal attacks against client funds in a number of group companies I critically reviewed group-wide operations in key FSA regulated areas to determine the risk of financial crime, any other deficiencies in internal controls and the unauthorised disclosure and misuse of client data.

This exposed previously unrecognised risks that needed urgent attention involving the security of client standing data, and in later assignments, the control of dissentient shareholder funds, payment instruments and funds disbursed during corporate actions. These risks arose through the attenuation of controls and lack of awareness by staff of the methods used by criminals to attack attractive targets. The review also discovered serious flaws in the group’s response to criminal attacks and the effectiveness of its proposed countermeasures.

Further work included reviewing and rebutting the findings of a Section 166 report produced by a big 4 accountancy firm and in a later, unconnected assignment I found that STRs generated when a group company acted as an intermediary were effectively being ignored. This finding reportedly went to chairman level at the intermediary and principal companies.

Italy: Reviewing fraud risks and control vulnerabilities in a major retail chain on behalf of a high-profile international investigations consultancy.  A number of buyers were dismissed, supplier relationships ended and a Far Eastern buying groups reorganised as a result.  

Middle East: Reviewing fraud risks and control vulnerabilities in payment systems in the oil industry. I identified major systems weaknesses which had compromised the integrity of supplier payments over several years and serious logic errors in programmes used to support investment decisions.  As a result the company undertook an extensive review to verify supplier payments and reappraised the role of its IT Department and the use of external consultants.

Middle East: Corruption in the oil industry involving employees and major suppliers. A major oil-field upgrade and the adoption of new technology had been compromised, at great financial exposure. I obtained the evidence against the personnel involved (who were subsequently dismissed) interviewed them and interviewed and managed enquires with suppliers. Three suppliers were dismissed, others were subjected to stringent controls and the oilfield upgrade re-examined.

Hibis (Europe) Limited: March 2003 – May 2005

I was appointed an executive director of Hibis, which also has a large presence in Scandinavia in addition to its UK operations. Hibis had a broad portfolio of assignments: Investigations included: procurement fraud and grey market trading, treasury fraud and tracing the laundered proceeds of a major bank fraud, leasing and other frauds in transportation and airline industries, high technology anti-counterfeiting, involving organised criminals and corruption in power distribution. Other assignments included training and re-engineering of internal audit and investigations departments, fraud contingency planning, profit enhancement and prevention of loss in company turn-arounds and assisting clients to implement fraud counter-measures.

Maxima Group plc, London: March 2001 - March 2003

An executive director of Maxima, and head of its forensic accounting division. Assignments included investigating: banking and treasury frauds in Switzerland, industrial espionage in Belgium and theft of highly valuable bid information in oil-field construction projects (the Netherlands) by information brokers.

Armor Group, London, New York City and Charlotte, USA: January 2000 - January 2001

Armor Group is a division of Armor Holdings Inc., (NYSE) which manufactures non-lethal military and law enforcement equipment. In 1998 it commenced a series of acquisitions to establish a global presence in fraud and security risk management.

In January 2000, I was recruited as Senior Vice President responsible for:

    •       Managing fraud investigations and related business development in the Americas, managing clients from the major banking centres, New York City and Charlotte, NC. Leading investigations in the oil industry in East Africa and co-ordinated our business development with the London head office.

    •       Co-ordinating and developing services for US corporations operating outside the US, developing an intelligence gathering and due diligence service, principally for major banks and multinationals operating in South America, the former Soviet Union and East Europe.

    •       Investigating potential acquisitions and resources to broaden Armor’s presence in the US.

Armor Group was ultimately unable to properly integrate its previous acquisitions or commit the resources necessary to achieve a critical mass in the United States.  In October 2000 it announced a decision to reduce its commitment and effectively withdrew from fraud-related activities in Europe, Russia and the US.

De Chazal Du  Mee, Port Louis, Mauritius - August 1997: January 2000

De Chazal Du Mee represented Andersen Worldwide SC throughout Sub–Saharan Africa and has offices in Mauritius, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, Uganda, Ghana, Madagascar and Chad.

I was appointed the firm’s first Forensic Accounting Partner with responsibility to develop forensic audits, fraud investigations, loss-prevention and detection, training and due diligence assignments throughout Africa:

    •       Investigating abuses of Mauritius’ offshore financial services sector.

    •       Re-structuring the Internal Audit function of Africa’s fifth largest banking group to enhance its effectiveness through a systematic risk-based approach to its work.

    •       Investigating bank frauds involving illicit funds and asset transfers prior to company receiverships and liquidations (US$ 3 million).

    •       Enhancing Customs revenue collections by improving intelligence gathering and investigation skills, recruitment, training and human resource development, accounting systems and reporting structures.

    •       Training, assisting and advising police and customs officers investigating major customs frauds.

    •       Due diligence investigations for the purchase and privatisation of oil companies in East Africa.

    •       Identifying and preventing loss and mismanagement of donors’ funds intended for programmes to alleviate poverty.

ORNA Corporate Security AG, Basel, Switzerland: September 1994 - July 1997

ORNA was a specialist fraud consulting company, with a very extensive Swiss and Central European client base:

    •       Foreign Exchange and Commodities Fraud: US$30m (Switzerland, Germany and the UK).  Organised criminals used bogus foreign exchange and commodities dealers to launder fraud proceeds through banks in the UK, USA, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and the Caribbean.

    •       After identifying the fraud, I investigated it and controlled successful recovery procedures on the client’s behalf, including the selection and instruction of solicitors, outside counsel and expert witnesses.  

    •       Major International Procurement Fraud and Money Laundering - Automotive Industry: $500m+.  This case is now partially a matter of public record in Germany, with the involvement of the BKA and in Switzerland. The case involved corruption in Germany and the Czech Republic, information brokering, kickbacks and money laundering in Germany, Switzerland and Spain.

    •       Embezzlement: US$6m (Switzerland, Spain and France).  This was a complex, collusive financial fraud involving the manipulation of inventory, banking and other accounting records.  The Geneva based client made a complete financial recovery.

    •       Investigation of Duty Frauds on behalf of the Ministry of Finance, Government of the Republic of the Philippines: US$300m.

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    •       Investigation of Cartel (Central Europe and Eastern Europe and Scandinavia).   Uncovering an anti-competitive cartel on behalf of a major multinational and reporting evidence to management and outside counsel of price dumping and fixing, project allocation, bribery and corruption and physical threats against non-participants by those involved.

    •       Procurement Fraud: US$3m (Switzerland and Poland).  Bogus front companies controlled by organised crime defrauded a major multinational.

    •       Investor Fraud: US$500k (Czech Republic).  Fraudulent assignment of manufacturing contracts and theft, involving organised crime.

    •       Leakage of Sensitive Financial Information (Switzerland). By using a special technique, Scientific Content Analysis, I obtained a confession from a field of 55 suspects.

    •       Training Financial Investigators (Philippines). Training investigators from the Bureau of Customs and Excise, the National Bank and Economic Intelligence and Investigation Bureau in techniques for detecting fraud and money laundering.

Network Security Management Limited (“Network”), London - October 1986 - June 1994

As the first non-law enforcement professional to become a Network investigator I was appointed to the Board in mid-1990.

    •       Bank frauds, Savings and Loans, Insurance (US, UK and Western and Southern Europe).  I had key roles in obtaining substantial financial recoveries and liaising with Metropolitan Police, US Secret Service and Swiss Authorities to prosecute offenders.

    •       Specialist reviews of purchasing and procurement.  In banking, electronics, food manufacturing and service industries in the US and UK, results included terminations and imprisonment of previously unsuspected personnel.

    •       Treasury operations - Canada and Argentina.  Reviews to establish vulnerabilities to dealer, back office and third party frauds.

    •       Other operations.  Investigating theft of hi-tech computer software and memory boards, software licence infringements, asset tracing, treasury abuses and professional negligence.

Esso Petroleum Company UK Limited (“Esso”), London - February 1979 - October 1986

    •       An analyst reporting on the financial and operating performance of the company’s down-stream distribution network of storage terminals, trucking operations and pipelines.

    •       Member of ground-breaking team (the first of its kind outside the USA) to analyse and recommend fundamental changes to the company’s distribution network to streamline its operations and make efficiency savings.

    •       Senior Internal Auditor responsible for carrying out system reviews, financial and operational audits in company departments and those of subsidiaries in Western Europe, Scandinavia.

    •       Manager responsible for Sales Accounting, managing a team of 28 responsible for the accurate and complete recording and analysis of all the company’s sales.

Coopers & Lybrand, London - October 1973 - February 1979

    •       Trainee Accountant working on a wide-range of statutory audits for major clients in manufacturing and financial services.

    •       Seconded to the Liquidations Department to investigate shortfalls in funds owed to creditors in a number of voluntary and involuntary liquidations.