€458m dirty money goods confiscated

POLICE stripped criminals of property worth nearly half a billion euros in “dirty money” seizures in 2014 – with much of the money raised being put back directly into funding police work.

In all, the Police Nationale and Gendarmerie confiscated €458,183,530 of “proceeds of crime” property ranging from bank accounts through top-end electronics and luxury cars to 7,000 bank accounts.

The 2014 total includes 600 properties that were confiscated for a total value of €330million but does not include two Savoie luxury hotels worth €102million that were seized recently.

Confiscations last year rose 27% on 2013 and police sources told Le Parisien that there was a “a real willingness to seize goods illegally purchased using the proceeds of crime” as criminals themselves saw it as hitting them harder than the threat of jail.

More than 60% of the seizures came through the Police Judiciaire as they target organised crime but a senior Police Nationale source told the newspaper that the PJ was losing its monopoly on seizures as other police agencies began to systematically confiscate goods bought with dirty money.

The rise in seizures is also driven by the fact that each region has a specialist investigator with access to the national database on criminal holdings.

Once seized, the dirty money and goods are managed by the seizures agency Agrasc which decides whether items should be resold or, for vehicles especially, passed on to police and gendarmerie for their use.
Photo: Phovoir