Posted on 01st December, 2023
Chasing Shadows
“We have a target on the move. You’re not hearing any of this, OK?”
That’s exactly the kind of instruction a thriller writer loves to hear.
I was sitting in an office in the Brussels headquarters of UCLAF (now OLAF), the European Union’s fraud-busting squad, comprised of police officers, customs officers, lawyers and accountants on secondment from the member states. Across the other side of the desk, an Irish customs officer was speaking into the phone, answering an urgent call that had come through in the middle of our interview.
Who was the target to whom he was referring? I don’t know exactly. For obvious reasons, the customs officer wasn’t going to reveal that to a nosey novelist like me. But I do know it was someone involved in the cigarette smuggling business – and I use that term advisedly because it’s a very big, profitable racket – and that he was under surveillance by EU law enforcement officers. The rest of the customs officer’s phone conversation I can’t reveal, but suffice to say it gave me a vivid feel for the work of the fraud-busters, and some fantastic insider information to use in the book I was planning to write, the book that became Shadow Chasers.
How had I got there? Let’s go back a few years.
I was working in Italy as a journalist and happened to go to Naples where, in the back streets, I noticed children selling packs of cigarettes that were displayed on the bonnets of parked cars. The kids were young, nine or ten years old, some of them younger than that, and they clearly should have been in school at that time of day. The amount they were charging for the cigarettes was well below the price in a tobacconist’s shop so I knew they were contraband, cigarettes smuggled into the country to avoid paying duty on them. The criminals behind this lucrative piece of private enterprise, of course, were the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, and somewhere close by would be an adult keeping an eye on the kids, with a van to top up their stock when it ran out. And I could see it would run out often from the number of customers they were attracting. Why pay full price and a lot of tax on your smoke when you could get it thirty per cent cheaper on the streets?
That memory stayed with me, the idea germinating in my mind over a long period. I did some research into the contraband trade and discovered UCLAF (the Unité de Coordination de la Lutte Anti-Fraude), an EU organisation that, until then, I’d never heard of. I found their annual reports, which detail their fight against fraud, and studied them, then got in touch with their office to ask if I could come and talk to their staff. To my surprise – I was expecting a straight no – they were more than happy to cooperate. I took the Eurostar to Brussels where the director of UCLAF had arranged a series of meetings for me with members of his team. There was only one condition: no names, the officers had to remain anonymous.
The remit of the unit is extensive. They look at fraud in a huge number of different areas – industry, agriculture, academia (yes, those distinguished university professors aren’t above fiddling the figures in their applications for EU funding). But the three big ones are cigarettes, alcohol and olive oil. The first two are obvious areas for fraud; olive oil less so, but if you adulterate the oil with, say, much cheaper hazelnut oil – which is very hard for consumers to detect – you can make a fortune.
Inevitably, most of the scams are run by organised crime groups and their scale is breathtaking. They’ve been known to charter roll-on-roll-off ferries and huge Ilyushin cargo planes to covertly transport contraband cigarettes into the EU. Or they exploit the rules about cargoes in transit across the EU to a non-member state. Here’s where the tiny principality of Andorra, in the Pyrenees, came into its own. Cigarettes manufactured legitimately in the UK were shipped to a bonded warehouse in the Netherlands, then on to Andorra, no customs duty payable as Andorra isn’t in the EU. In Andorra, the cigarettes were unloaded and transferred to vans and – yes – donkeys, then smuggled into France and Spain. UCLAF became a little suspicious about this apparently legal trade when they looked at the figures. They divided the number of cigarettes being shipped with the population of Andorra and discovered that each citizen was supposedly consuming something like ten thousand packets a year. That was some habit!
If you want to know more about the fraud-busters and their work in a fictional setting, take a look at Shadow Chasers.