Interviews

Theresa May on organised crime

by Mark Rowe

At the defence think-tank RUSI on June 11, the Home Secretary Theresa May gave a speech on organised crime. For the speech in full visit the Home Office website.

Organised crime amounts to a serious threat to our national security, she told the event.

She offered some statistics: organised crime costs the UK at least £24 billion a year. There are over 5,300 organised criminal groups that affect people in the UK today, and more than 36,000 people are engaged in these criminal activities. She said: “Most people don’t think of themselves as being a victim of organised crime, but the chances are that everyone in this room has been affected by organised crime in one form or another. Maybe you were caught up in their activities. Maybe your house was burgled by somebody addicted to drugs shipped here by a criminal gang. Maybe your emails were hacked. Maybe your insurance premiums are inflated because of organised scams. Maybe your taxes are higher because of fraud. Whatever your precise experience or experiences, the chances are that organised crime has affected all of us here today.

She admitted what she called an ‘uncomfortable point’: “Some organised criminals in some of our communities have been able to fill a vacuum of authority. They have established themselves as alternative providers of justice, security, housing and livelihoods. Some have become, perversely, a kind of role model to others in their local communities. This is quite profound. It troubles me greatly – as it should other national and local political and civic leaders. It needs challenging and confronting.”

She stressed the profit motive behind such crimes, and the cyber aspects, and the variety of sorts of organised crime, suggesting it ranged from horsemeat in British supermarket products to sports affected by match fixing; and, that organised crime ‘facilitates many other crimes’.

View on the RUSI website – https://www.rusi.org/events/ref:E5374C84FB80DE/info:public/infoID:E53983F772A65D/#.U56vGRZa_Hg

Also speaking at the event, HSBC Chief Legal Officer Stuart Levey stressed the need for public-private partnership as each side ought to share information the other. “Financial institutions can see end-to-end global payment flows in great detail, but lack specific indicators of which payments are truly those tied to criminality, relying instead on a system of filters and monitoring to spot anomalies. Having a first-rate compliance program is necessary to protect the institution and comply with the law, but not sufficient to identify which are the truly bad actors. The result of this situation is that the combined effort suffers. I am confident, having seen this effort from both sides, that we are not reaching our potential. The private sector generates reports to government without the benefit of perhaps the most important insights of all: an understanding of the illicit conduct government is most concerned about and its assessment of who may be engaged in that conduct. The reporting would be enhanced if there were a greater understanding of the government’s concerns. This, in turn, would enhance government’s understanding of the threats, potentially creating a mutually reinforcing and beneficial cycle.”

Another speaker, harked back to the 1950s and 1960s, when “mobsters – including the notorious Italian-American Mafia known as La Cosa Nostra – engaged in a variety of illicit schemes, including gambling rings, loan sharking, narcotics trafficking, extortion, and prostitution, that generated hordes of cash, which these criminals would deposit into banks”. Echoing Mrs May, he spoke of decentralized, nimble, and highly adaptable networks of transnational organised crime (TCO): “From drug trafficking to human trafficking to weapons trafficking, and from identity theft to cyber theft to intellectual property theft, TCOs today engage in an unprecedented array of illicit activities all across the globe, often aided by corrupt officials and criminally-connected powerful businessmen.” Again, like Mrs May he warned of corruption of business and the professions; ‘attorneys, accountants, and bankers are recruited, co-opted, or exploited’.

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