Kenya is pushing for information exchange and streamlined laws among the International Police (Interpol) countries to curb financial crimes.

Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) chief executive Halakhe Waqo said Kenyans expect too much from the commission which is grappling with red tape in bid to get information.

Mr Waqo said mutual legal assistance has protocols that take a lot of time before requests are processed between countries.

“You remember the so called Chicken Gate scandal when we had to get the money recovered from the British authorities. While it took a lot of time, we faced undue pressure as Kenyans wanted us to be faster than the process,” he said.

The British government is expected to wire back Ksh52 million (£349,057) to Kenya under the policy of returning the laundered resources directly to the people through social development projects.

EACC is also expecting Ksh525 million (around $5.2 million) from Jersey — where two Kenyans have been charged with money laundering — to be repatriated within the year.

Mr Waqo was speaking at the 16th Interpol Global Programme on Anti-Corruption, Financial Crimes and Asset Recovery in Nairobi yesterday where he called for closer cooperation between the 17 countries involved in the programme.

He said even as African countries push for money stashed away in the tax havens in the West, they should also do more to help peer countries trace money hidden within African countries.

The programme seeks to train the police, intelligence officers, regulators and anti-corruption officials to help curb cross border financial crimes through networking and information sharing.

They will be seeking to improve understanding of the evolving nature of financial crime given improved technology as well as agency partnerships to avoid overlapping.

Corruption and financial crime has gone a notch higher with hackers targeting Central and Commercial Banks while highly connected individuals were exposed to be linked to possible tax evasion scam through Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca.

A cyber-attack, saw Sh8.1 billion ($81 million) stolen from Bangladesh’s central bank and BBC News reported that an unnamed commercial bank also came under attack targeting its money.

Swift, which oversees the financial messaging network that underpins global money transfers said the second attack showed that the Bangladesh theft was not an isolated incident but ‘part of a wider and highly adaptive campaign targeting banks.’

Hacktivists have also gone after the websites of the Central Bank of Cyprus which briefly came under cyber-attack, days after a hacking collective said it conducted a similar attack on the Greek central bank’s site while attempts have been made to breach the Central Bank of Kenya.