Examination of Witnesses (Questions 520
- 539)
TUESDAY 1 DECEMBER 2009
MR BILL
HUGHES AND
MR NEIL
GILES
Q520 Chairman: So nobody can tell
us.
Mr Hughes: No.
Q521 Chairman: The figure that we
are using of 45 million could well be the wrong figure.
Mr Hughes: 45 tonnes. 35 to 45
tonnes is an estimate based on how much is produced in South America,
how much we think is being moved across to Europe and how much
of that enters the UK.
Q522 Chairman: We do not actually
know what the cocaine threat is because you do not have a reliable
set of figures as to what is entering the UK.
Mr Hughes: No, because it would
be impossible to do that.
Q523 Chairman: Let us turn on to
the next point that you have alluded to which is in your submission
to our inquiry into SOCA which, as I said, we have just concluded.
You have said that high street prices and reduced purity can be
attributed at least in part to your success and the success of
SOCA. What evidence do you have that higher prices of cocaine
and a reduction in purity is driven by what you have done?
Mr Hughes: I do not think we actually
said that; what we said was that the work that has been done on
interdiction has driven up the price that people are paying for
it now, the wholesale price. What we have also done is reduced
the availability because talking to our informants and listening
on telephone interception, the availability of cocaine is very
difficult to come by in this country. From what we have done there
has certainly been an impact upon the availability of cocaine
to organised crime in the UK; that is what we have ascribed to
the work that we have done in partnership with all of our partners
overseas and in the United Kingdom. That is what we think has
happened. The availability of cocaine on the streetsor
something masquerading as cocaineis a different issue altogether
because that is very heavily cut and it contains very small amounts
of actual cocaine, and that is one of the issues that comes up
in the price/purity question which you want to come onto.
Q524 Chairman: That is the question:
it is becoming less pure and more expensive.
Mr Hughes: Exactly.
Q525 Mrs Dean: Mr Giles, SOCA states
that, as at 31 March this year, it had "over 340 operations,
projects and enquiries in hand, the primary focus of approximately
half of which was the cocaine trade". What proportion of
these 170 cocaine-related projects involves active operations
as opposed to information mapping?
Mr Giles: I am not sure I define
the categories in quite the way that you have but the figures
quite clearly at 1 April this year were that we had 88 full operations
which we would call investigations, but please bear in mind that
everything we do has an intelligence requirement associated with
it; we collect intelligence to improve our knowledge from everything
that we do. Of the remainder some 24 were project linesgathering
information to grow our knowledge towards drug activityand
61 were single strand inquiries.
Q526 Mrs Dean: What were the single
strand enquiries?
Mr Giles: They tend to be a single
question in relation to a person or a group of people or perhaps
a product.
Mr Hughes: The sort of thing:
is this guy involved in cocaine trafficking? Go and find out.
Q527 Mrs Dean: In how many of those
would you then find out they were involved in cocaine trafficking?
Mr Hughes: If we do then they
move on to be in an operation where we look for a criminal justice
outcome or some other outcome which will take them out of the
cocaine trafficking trade.
Q528 Mrs Dean: They might be counted
in that category in another year.
Mr Hughes: Yes, they may move
into an operational area or be part of a project approach where
we are picking up themes and different people and different groups
have come in and linked in some way perhaps through transport
or other arrangements.
Q529 Mrs Dean: But they will not
be double-counted in the same year.
Mr Hughes: No.
Q530 David Davies: Mr Hughes, I am
genuinely not trying to be difficult here.
Mr Hughes: I am not taking you
to be difficult.
Q531 David Davies: I am on your side,
believe me. I have a simple question, the answer to which will
either be yes, no, or I am not certain but I will write to you,
and it is this: if the Colombian police went up to the SOCA contact
in Colombia and said "We are suspicious about this person
who has lived in the UK; could you find out any information you
can about them that may be on the police national computer",
and that information is then handed back to the Colombian police.
Subsequently that person is arrested by the Colombian police with
one tonne of cocaine. Will that one tonne of cocaine be counted
as part of your figures of cocaine seized throughout the year?
Mr Hughes: If there is more than
us doing simply what you suggest, yes.
Q532 David Davies: This is the point.
How much more would there have to be?
Mr Hughes: First of all it is
unlikely that the operation would start in the way that you have
described because the intelligence usually comes from us and not
from the Colombians. On that basis then we would work in a joint
partnership to understand how that cocaine is being trafficked.
If we can find the location where it is being produced in Colombia
we will engage with our units over there in an operation to remove
that source of the cocaine.
Q533 David Davies: What happens if
you say to your Colombian contact "We are a bit suspicious
about this person". The Colombian contact then goes off and
finds where the stuff is being produced, runs an operation and
has that person arrested with one tonne of cocaine; will that
one tonne count on your figures or not?
Mr Hughes: The Colombian contact
will do it in partnership with us, in which case that would be
a joint operation and in which case we would count that. If it
is a single operation where they go off and seize cocaine and
all we have done is been involved, as you describe, in just providing
a PNC reference, we will not count that.
Q534 Tom Brake: Mr Hughes, is it
you who ultimately makes the decision whether to count it in our
figures or not?
Mr Hughes: We have criteria which
we have agreed with the various inspecting authorities, with the
Home Secretary and the Home Office about what we count as down
to SOCA or not down to SOCA.
Q535 Tom Brake: So you have in effect
a checklist and if you meet these criteria then it automatically
becomes a UK seizure, is that right?
Mr Hughes: We would count it in
those circumstances if it fits those criteria, yes. That is one
of the things that we are audited upon.
Q536 Mr Streeter: Just turning to
other issues, we are aware that there are well-known routes for
cocaine coming into this country, West Africa being one of them.
We have been told over the last few weeks actually that that has
gone a little bit quieter than it has been in the past but are
you aware, either Mr Giles or Mr Hughes, of new patterns emerging
of where people are getting the drug into the UK?
Mr Giles: We are aware certainly
that the cocaine traffickers do all they can to develop new tactics
to get by us and we are as close to that intelligence picture
as we can be. Obviously West Africa is an issue for cocaine trafficking
to the UK and we work very closely with European partners in West
Africa to ensure that we are able to do the kind of work we need
to do with partners there to prevent that happening, but we are
aware of new trends, yes.
Mr Hughes: What we have seen there
are Venezuelan and Colombian groups starting to emerge in some
of the countries of West Africa that are challenged, if you like,
in terms of their infrastructure, their government and they are
corrupting those governments. They are establishing bridgeheads
so that cocaine can be shipped across and then follow the original
trading routes from Africa into Europe, so we are looking at all
of those.
Q537 Mr Streeter: We all support
the intelligence-led approach that you are advocating and deploying.
Of course that means that if the serious and organised criminals
become aware of our patterns, our methods, our intelligence platform,
the whole thing is compromised. Are you aware of high level attempts,
of them trying to bribe senior figures either in SOCA or in UKBA?
I did ask this question at Heathrow yesterday and I was not quite
sure of the answer I got, but does that happen, are approaches
made even if they are rebuffed and reported upon?
Mr Hughes: We are aware that serious
and organised crime has tried to infiltrate SOCA. They are interested
in the information that we hold and the methods by which we gather
that intelligence. Overseas it is one of the reasons why we work
with carefully selected units of law enforcement because of corruption
being endemic in certain parts of the world, and we have steps
which again I am not prepared to go into here to deal with those
issues. The whole point around that is that we are working towards
all of the officers in SOCA being at what we call "developed
vetting level" which is for reading top secret so we can
share information and make sure the information does not get leaked.
It is one of the areas where we have a very strong professional
standards and counter-corruption department and a security department
that looks all the time so that we do not lose information.
Chairman: Thank you Mr Streeter. The
Committee is very keen to know of circumstances where cocaine
is prevented from coming into the United Kingdom. We went to Heathrow
Airport yesterday to Terminal 4 to look at the procedures that
were adopted there, the targeting that goes on, the very good
work that is done by so many people. It is preventing it arriving;
that is actually a very important consideration for this Committee
so of course we will come and take a briefing from you but we
were very keen to look at work overseas, working with other governments,
because they certainly need our help and expertise.
Q538 Bob Russell: Gentlemen, in view
of earlier exchanges can I say that I appreciate the work that
SOCA officers do in this very murky world, both at home and overseas
and others with whom you work. Mr Giles, what proportion of those
trafficking cocaine into the UK are British criminals?
Mr Giles: Mr Russell, Chairman,
I am bound to say this is a difficult question to answer because
it depends where you are in the supply chain. Colombian traffickers
dominate and control
Q539 Bob Russell: That was my second
question, how many are Colombian?
Mr Giles: It is impossible to
delineate in quite the way you would like because they control
different aspects of the trade. If you want to buy cocaine inevitably
you are going to have to do business with a Colombian at some
point in the supply chain.
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