Detectives to expand efforts to seize assets from gangsters who live abroad in effort to tackle £30bn fraud bill

Civil recovery is the latest police tactic against one set of highly organised criminals

Lawyers said that the tactic would be cheaper and potentially more lucrative (Alamy)

Detectives are set to expand their efforts to seize assets from gangsters who live abroad to try to tackle the UK’s £30bn fraud bill, a senior officer has told The Independent on Sunday.

Police are copying the practices of the private sector in a series of pilot projects targeting the UK-based assets of criminals who avoid prosecution by operating from countries such as Russia, said Commander Chris Greany, the national police coordinator for economic crime from the City of London police.

Instead of securing convictions and then recovering criminal proceeds, the project will investigate the lesser-used tactic of civil recovery. The level of proof required to show that assets came from criminal schemes is lower – but it means that the fraudster will not go to prison.

Lawyers said that the tactic would be cheaper and potentially more lucrative for forces facing large budget cuts because they secure a proportion of the assets they seize. One claimed that it represented a growing trend in the criminal justice system to focus on criminal cases that secured money rather than convictions.

Commander Greany said detectives from the City of London police were working with the Home Office and private civil-recovery specialists on the project.

Commander Chris Greany, the national police coordinator for economic crime from the City of London police

“If you look at criminal gangs, they like their flash watches and their symbols of wealth. If you can remove that status, although they’re walking free, you undermine them in a different way,” said Commander Greany. “It annoys them and wears them down. Private companies use civil recovery all the time. I want the criminals to see what we’re doing and fear what we’re doing. We’re not going to arrest our way out of it – it’s too big, and too global.”

While criminals can operate from abroad while conducting sophisticated cyber frauds on UK-based customers, their criminal gains may well pass through Britain, a recognised centre of money laundering because of the scale of its financial services industry.

“It [civil recovery] is not terribly well understood,” said Evan Wright, a partner in business crime at solicitors JMW and a specialist in civil recovery cases.

“As a defence lawyer, I’m just glad they don’t because it’s quite difficult to defend.

“If the police figured that out and really got their heads around that nationally, they would then say it’s not as complex as it looks.

“But there are only so many officers who know what they are doing. If they’re going to ramp up the figures, they will have to train a lot of officers – and that’s expensive – or outsource it at an early stage.”

The Government introduced the Serious Crime Act this year, in part to make it easier to seize the proceeds of crime. The tactic of civil recovery is already used with limited success by the National Crime Agency (NCA) and the Serious Fraud Office. The National Crime Agency secured only £10m from civil recovery orders in 2014-15, which represents two-fifths of the money it seized, according to its annual report. Another £139m was frozen or otherwise put out of reach of criminals in Britain and abroad, representing only a tiny fraction of the UK’s estimated annual fraud bill of £30bn.

MPs earlier this year criticised the NCA’s record since it was set up in 2013, and said that its rate of retrieving money was a poor return on its half-billion budget.

The failure of the NCA’s predecessor, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), to take money away from the most serious criminal players was cited as one of the main reasons behind its closure. In 2010, Soca denied £143m to crime bosses – just £20m less than the NCA’s record last year.

Kyle Phillips, from the business crime regulatory team at solicitors Slater and Gordon, said: “Criminals caught with large sums of money can normally prove its legitimacy – they don’t get caught with tens of millions in the trunk of their car. It’s very hard to seize money unless it’s in cash.”

Commander Greany said the asset seizure was one plank of a campaign of harassment targeting major fraudsters. Other tactics have included officers shutting down websites and telephone lines being used for boiler-room scams – high-pressure selling of worthless investments to vulnerable customers.

In July, the force targeted serviced office companies based at prestigious addresses in the City of London that provided boiler rooms with a veneer of respectability, while their criminal operations were run from elsewhere.