By Sumeet Desai
London - British finance minister Gordon Brown will promise on Tuesday to release an extra £20-million to fight terrorism and provide support for the victims of the London bomb attacks, Treasury officials said.
In testimony to parliament's Treasury Select Committee, Brown will also announce the creation of a new group working across government to make progress on the identification of further targets for asset freezing, the officials told Reuters.
Britain has so far frozen £370 000 worth of assets in 45 accounts.
Brown's promise of an extra £20-million will be in addition to the increased spending on counter-terrorism announced last year.
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He pledged last summer increased resources of £450-million next year and nearly £560-million in the year after, taking the total to more than £2-billion by 2007/08, compared with less than a billion pounds before the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Brown will also task Sir Stephen Lander, chairman of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, to report by March 2006 on how to improve investigations into suspicious transactions - with numbers of such cases reported having risen fivefold from 30 000 to 150 000 since 2001.
Officials said Brown would set out measures to boost the coordinated international effort to counter terrorist financing.
These would include asking a group of experts to report to Group of Seven finance ministers meeting in Washington in September on reforms to improve the sharing of information and action to freeze assets. Britain currently holds the presidency of the G7.
"Where there are countries that are not taking action to cut off the sources of terrorist finance, we will clearly have continuing problems," Brown said in Brussels last week.
Brown will also tell parliament that Britain would support technical assistance for those countries that need to enhance their counter-terrorism capacity so that no state offers a hiding place for terrorist money, the officials said.
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