Police have successfully solved 50,853 out 73,425 commercial crime cases which have been pending since the last 20 years, said Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Abdul Hamid Bador.

He said the police were in the midst of solving the remaining 22,572 pending cases, besides working on the more than 14,000 newly reported cases this year.

"Under the leadership of the new Bukit Aman Commercial Criminal Investigations Department (CCID) director (Datuk Zainuddin Yaacob), I have requested that they continue with solving the cases which have been pending since 2000.

"Investigation officers must solve their cases in the allocated time or I will take action if they don't have a good excuse on why they were unable to solve them," he told Bernama after the handing over of duty ceremony of the CCID director post in Bukit Aman, today.

Abdul Hamid revealed that there were a number of cases which were being handled by PDRM's Integrity and Standard Compliance Department involving investigation officers who did not take the required action.

In a related development, Abdul Hamid also reminded local telecommunication companies to play a role in assisting the police to reduce the number of commercial crime cases.

"These criminals were able to obtain information just by using mobile phones, so the telcos must ensure that every purchase and registration of telephone numbers by buyers, including foreigners, were carried out according to the regulations such as by recording their identity card or passport details," he explained.

Meanwhile, Zainuddin said the CCID would continue to intensify efforts in solving the pending cases.

"We understand that priority must be given to old cases, so will do this besides focusing on criminal breach of trust cases," he said.

On July 12, Abdul Hamid said all 'cold' cases that have not been resolved by the Bukit Aman CCID would be re-opened for investigation and the responsible officers were given a month to complete the task.

-- BERNAMA