Former head of MI5 Sir Stephen Lander told Northern Ireland business people in Belfast yesterday that they have a crucial obligation to help tackle organised crime in Britain and Northern Ireland, which is worth up to £40 billion (€58.9 billion) annually.
Bankers, accountants, lawyers, estate agents and others business people heard from Sir Stephen yesterday how tough new legislation is tightening their responsibility to identify clients or customers whom they suspect of money laundering.
Even lap-dancing clubs were now coming under the scrutiny of the various anti-organised crime agencies, he said.
Sir Stephen said there were cases of collusion between business professionals and criminals and also "tensions" in certain businesses where there was often pressure "to turn a blind eye" to suspected money laundering by clients in order "to sustain profitability".
Republican and loyalist paramilitaries as well as "ordinary" criminals engage in "hundreds of millions of pounds" of money laundering annually in the North, added Sir Stephen, chairman of the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency. He was director general of MI5 from 1996 to 2002.
Overall, criminals are netting between £20 billion and £40 billion each year in Britain and Northern Ireland, he told a gathering of 150 business people in Belfast's Hilton Hotel yesterday morning.
"Estimates of the scale of those profits internationally vary, but recent calculations suggest that over £5 billion of criminal proceeds are laundered in or from the UK annually," he said.
He did not have a precise figure but paramilitary and general criminal money laundering ran into "hundreds of millions" in Northern Ireland, he told The Irish Times.
Under terrorism and anti-crime legislation financial institutions, lawyers and accountants must inform the authorities if they suspect clients or customers are engaged in money laundering. Equally they must not tip off their clients that they were under suspicion.
That legislation was now strengthened, he added, so that other businesses such as estate agents, travel agents, sellers of luxury goods such as jewellery, expensive cars and yachts, which could be exploited to launder criminal proceeds, were also obliged to submit Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to the authorities if they suspected such crime.
Yesterday's conference heard how the legislation was beginning to have an impact, with bankers, professionals and businesses annually submitting 6,000 SARs in Northern Ireland relating to cases where they suspected their clients could be guilty of money laundering.
