Scotland Yard is seizing record sums from London’s criminal “Mr Bigs” using new powers to freeze bank accounts containing suspected illicit cash.
Figures show that the Met has seized £83 million from suspected criminals in the 11 months to the end of 2018 — a 50 per cent rise on the previous year.
Detectives are using powers that came in last January that allow law enforcement agencies to freeze the accounts of individuals suspected of involvement in crime. So far, the Met has obtained 199 account freezing orders with a total value of £42,327,826.
The measures were part of legislation to target organised crime and run in parallel with unexplained wealth orders.
Police say they are also seizing regular bundles of cash — part of the “billions” in drug-dealing profits being ferried around the capital. Officers say criminal couriers carry huge sums in suitcases, rucksacks and shopping bags to convert at the UK’s 45,000 money service bureaus, the vast majority in London. The cash is laundered through MSBs before being dispatched to airports such as Heathrow and air freighted abroad.
Detective Superintendent Nick Stevens, head of economic crime at Scotland Yard, said: “Street drug dealers deal in cash because their clients want to pay cash and we follow that up through the chain, the organised criminals and the money launderers.” He added: “Cash will move through an MSB and the money will be freighted out of the country — £2 billion a month — to countries such as UAE and other places.”
He said the Met’s Proactive Money Laundering Team seize parcels of cash from criminals nearly every day. In the 12 months to November the Met made 817 seizures.
Mr Stevens said the new laws had “opened up significant opportunities”. He added: “The account freezing orders are decided by magistrates’ courts on the balance of probabilities and can be followed up with forfeiture requests.”
All the investigations are ongoing and, so far, none of the sums has been ordered by the court to be forfeited.
Last year, Edoardo Archetta, who ran Italian restaurant Bucci in Balham, was jailed after being convicted over a global money-laundering operation for the Ndràngheta mafia group.
Archetta, 47, who used a small Paddington money bureau, also operated for London-based Albanian drug-dealers.
