Brief Bio

• Harjit Sandhu is a senior Police Officer and a Certified Fraud Examiner with over 35 years standing in the profession and has, at various time points in his career, held high-level leadership positions in the field of law enforcement, counter-terrorism, war crimes, homicide investigations including political assassinations, investigation of financial crimes as well as financing of terrorism and organised crime including arms trafficking networks etc.
• As an IPS (Indian Police Service) officer, he served as a District Police Chief and was also a Commanding Officer of an armed Battalion engaged with counter-insurgency operations and a Superintendent of Police in the elite Anti-Corruption and Oversight Agency of the country, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). In the CBI, he investigated and supervised cases of corruption, abuse of authority, amassing assets disproportionate to the known sources of income, misfeasance and malfeasance by top bureaucrats and politicians.
• At international level, he had assignments with Interpol General Secretariat (more than 3 years), UN Security Council (2 years), UN-International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (6 years), Special Tribunal for Lebanon (3 years), where he led investigations into international crime, drafting and editing reports, preparing policy guidelines, capacity building and liaison with other international organisations.
• As Expert, Coordinator and Spokesperson for five Panels of Experts for UN Security Council in pursuance of resolutions 1306, 1343, 1395 and 1407 and 1408 relating to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Somalia, he steered teams of international experts monitoring cases of UN sanctions and the global arms trafficking networks.
• Over the years, he has also provided services as an ‘Independent Expert’ to UN Counter-Terrorism Committee, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, OSCE, Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) and Commonwealth Secretariat. Report prepared by Harjit jointly with US agency FinCEN on “Hawala and Money Laundering” in 2000 has been used by law enforcement agencies as well as courts, all over the world.
• He has delivered training at national and international level to Bankers, Police officers, Educational Institutes and Judiciary in areas of financial crimes, frauds, money laundering, financing of terrorism, war crimes & crimes against humanity, intelligence gathering and other miscellaneous law enforcement subjects. He has also assisted several national, regional and international organizations in capacity building and in preparing their training manuals.
• Since April 2012, he has been leading a culturally-diverse team of investigators in the internal oversight office of UN’s World Food Programme, the leading humanitarian organization fighting hunger worldwide, delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience.