PROPERTY assets linked to the Christy Kinahan-led international drugs cartel in Brazil alone are worth an estimated €500 million.
That sum is more than treble the value of all cash and assets seized by the Criminals Assets Bureau in Ireland since the bureau’s inception almost 15 years ago. The details that continued to emerge in Spain yesterday reveal that Kinahan is at the head of a mafia-style operation with assets worldwide funded by drug trafficking, money laundering, gun running and even human trafficking.
The property portfolio in Brazil is comprised of six leisure complexes and a string of residential properties, with a combined value of €500 million, Spanish authorities say.
In Spain some 60 properties – including villas, apartments and business premises – have already been frozen in the first part of an assets confiscation case there. The properties in Spain are valued at about €150 million by the authorities.
The Spanish properties are located along the Costa in Benalmadena, Fuengirola, Mijas, Marbella, Nueva Andalusia and Estepona. Kinahan lives in a €6 million villa, and also regularly stays in an apartment valued at €800,000 in a gated complex near Marbella.
There are other properties in Ireland, England, Dubai, South Africa and Belgium.
One of the companies controlled by the gang is an upmarket car dealership in a Costa resort which sells supercars, Porsches, Bentleys, Hummers, McLarens and Ferraris, to name but a few.
Television news footage in Spain has shown vehicles being confiscated from the dealership and car parks next to plush apartments and villas where some of the nine Irish suspects where arrested on Tuesday morning.
It is believed that the international investigation being led by the Garda and authorities in Spain and the UK has identified a network of some 30 companies set up or controlled by the gang for money laundering and investment purposes.
Some of the firms are small front companies set up on the pretence of transporting food from Spain to the UK and Ireland. But for nearly a decade Kinahan has been transporting drugs in lorries to small warehouses in Ireland and England.
A spokesman for the Spanish interior ministry said the Kinahan gang had ploughed money into companies in a diverse range of sectors, including renewable energy, waste recycling and infrastructure projects.
The gang was not only investing and laundering its own drugs money, but was acting as financial agents for Irish gangs who used Kinahan and his legal and financial contacts in Spain to launder proceeds of their crimes.
The Garda and Spanish police have drawn up a list of 19 names which they believed represent the nucleus of the Kinahan gang. At least 11 people on the list are Irish.
The Spanish police had not prioritised investigating Irish organised crime gangs on the Costa del Sol until recently because local gangs were given more priority.
However, the murder of several Irish men in the past two years forced the Irish gangs on to the radar of the Spanish authorities.
Paddy Doyle (27), of Portland Place in Dublin’s north inner city, was shot dead as he drove his BMW 4X4 near Marbella in February, 2008. He was linked to one of the Crumlin-Drimnagh feuding gangs and was a suspect in at least three gun murders here.
Richard Keogh (30), from Cabra in Dublin, was shot dead in Benalmadena Costa near Marbella in January 2009. He was a known drug dealer.
Former John Gilligan gang member Peter Mitchell (40), of Summerhill in Dublin’s north inner city, was wounded in a shooting in Marbella in August 2008, but survived.
In the course of investigating these attacks the Spanish became aware of the presence of a large number of Irish gangs based in the south of the country, the biggest of these by far being the cartel headed by Christy Kinahan.
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