Professionals in 'McMafia'-style crime rings face crackdown, minister reveals
2 min read
Estate agents and solicitors who help to launder cash in Britain face a major crackdown as part of a multi-million plan to tackle organised crime, the security minister has announced.
Ben Wallace said senior professionals working in private schools, football clubs and luxury car garages were “cowards” who were facilitating rackets “like the McMafia programme”.
He said a new economic crime centre would help squeeze a network which oversees some £100bn of money laundering in the UK, as well as deal with other types of illicit activity.
The National Crime Agency said around 4,600 serious and organised crime groups existed in the UK five years ago, taking part in child abuse, trafficking and drug dealing, among other things.
Mr Wallace said: “Many serious and organised criminals think they are above the law.
“They think they can defy the British state. And they think they are free to act with impunity against our businesses and our way of life. They are wrong.”
And in an interview with the Guardian, he trained his sights on white collar workers who were facilitating serious economic crime by failing to report it.
“The ones who pretend their hands aren’t really dirty and profit from moving dirty money and knowingly conspire... they’re cowards to pretend they’re nothing really to do with it,” he told the paper.
“They are the ultimate. It’s like the McMafia programme. They comfort themselves by being at wonderful events and not getting their hands dirty.
“But their hands are as dirty as the person trafficking the child that they’re making their money from.”
He added: “We’re going to make sure that people who are proactively being facilitators are at the front of our queue as much as the actual nominals of the organised crime groups and we’re going to do everything we can to prosecute them.”
PoliticsHome Newsletters
PoliticsHome provides the most comprehensive coverage of UK politics anywhere on the web, offering high quality original reporting and analysis: Subscribe
