The Cocaine Trade - Home Affairs Committee Contents


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 streets—or something masquerading as cocaine—is 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 lines—gathering information to grow our knowledge towards drug activity—and 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.


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2010
Prepared 3 March 2010