It's estimated that one in six independent car dealers are fronts to money laundering services.
I'm going to bite the bullet here and wait any possible recriminations. The independent car trade has always been looked on as being somewhat suspect in some of their practices, in fact with a lot of them there wasn't much they did ethically. This ranged from inadvertently buying a pup and then trying to cover it up until the 3 month (or less) warranty had expired to deliberately buying high mileage motors and then "clocking" them or buying one or more write-offs and then "ringing" them.
However, money laundering didn't play a particularly big part until the last decade or so and (here comes the bullet biting bit) it's quite possibly down to a change in the ethnic make up of car dealers. This is happening as in nail parlours, take away food joints and even vehicle leasing.
Recently I came across an individual driving a 2 month old BMW 320i which was leased, complete with insurance from a company that only owned 3 cars. The lease company had also not filed any accounts, having been set up a little over 2 months ago, and all three cars had been bought cash at that time. The man who owned the firm was 21 and lived with his mum and dad and the monthly rental for the 320 was £200 including VAT. I can't claim to be an expert in these matters but that sounds more like Fiesta 1.3 money to me. Both the males in the car had links to drug dealing and both were in receipt of benefits; not the sort of people larger leasing firms tend to deal with.
If you lease a car it can't be seized under the Proceeds of Crime Act unless the owner can be shown to be complicit in the offences and there are no large sums of money to be traced around the country, neither can the rented flat you live in be seized and if you buy second hand furniture it may be too much like hard work to take that because it will only end up on the local tip.
There have been quite a lot of cash seizures at ports and airports around the country in the last 12 months sometimes up to £20,000 and not always in Sterling but often a combination including Euros and Dollars as well as Pounds.
£20,000 buys a very large plot of land in some countries and the next block of 20 Grand could well pay for the building and furnishing of a house as well. Lump this in with the number stolen cars that are being shipped out in containers to countries that drive on the left and this is a pretty big problem but because it doesn't tend to make headlines, because the crimes individually are quite small, it's overlooked by the media.
It's a good job other people are keeping their eyes open.
...................Viz has less sensationalist....less biased.....more accurate in depth journalism.
