Money laundering ring dismantled
Three members of a criminal network have been convicted of laundering £180 million of cash on behalf of drug traffickers at Birmingham Crown Court.
Three members of a criminal network have been convicted of laundering £180 million of cash on behalf of drug traffickers at Birmingham Crown Court.
After the convictions of Ali Usman, Aqeel Yousaf and Naiz Ali, details have come to light of the extensive money laundering operation they helped to run.
Twenty-nine others have also been convicted for their parts in the operation, their sentences totalling 140 years.
One of the 29, Muhammad Younas, who ran Mian International Ltd, a Manchester money services business, received 11 years. Between September 2008 and March 2011, its company bank accounts processed in excess of £160 million, all of which was directed into US Dollar accounts before being transferred to Asia and the Middle East.
Younas and other members of the criminal network created false records in a bid to account for those money flows. Receipts totalling £72 million were faked in an attempt to justify the sums being credited to Mian International Ltds accounts.
The network was dismantled by a series of arrests, as well as cash seizures by investigators totalling £2.6 million.
Greater Manchester Police, the Central Motorway Patrol Group, West Midlands Police and law enforcement bodies in the Netherlands, Germany, Australia and the United Arab Emirates were all involved in the investigation.
The laundering operation involved the collection of criminal cash from organised crime groups by a network of couriers. Those exchanges would be arranged using coded text messages.
Ali Usman, Aqeel Yousaf and Naiz Ali were involved in more than £500,000 of laundering using a method called cuckoo smurfing. This involved the payment of criminal cash into the bank accounts of unwitting recipients, typically students from Iran who were expecting transfers from home into their UK accounts, with the criminals keeping the clean money sent from the families.
Simon Flowers, from the National Crime Agency (NCA), said: This investigation has successfully targeted and dismantled one of the most significant money laundering networks seen in the UK. Criminality like this is the nuts and bolts of organised crime, as the perpetrators can neither do business nor hope to evade detection without making illicit cash flows appear legitimate.
Ali Usman, Aqeel Yousaf, and Naiz Ali will be sentenced at a later date.