Question: Factual or Propaganda? "British government begins stealing its peoples’ bank deposits.."

[Ed Jewett]

British government begins stealing its peoples' bank deposits ahead of the global financial collapse.
Posted by PCLatest news, World newsMonday, August 8th, 2011

http://presscore.ca/2011/?p=3598

It's being mirrored in a lot of strange places too....

Opening text:

"It happened before and it is starting again. Government confiscating (stealing) the people's life savings. Just like in 1929 the British government began its theft of the people's life savings just before the Great Depression. After an inflationary run-up in prices and asset values, the stock market crashed in 1929, and the economy soon went with the crash. This time the British government is disguising its outright theft by claiming the entire contents of safety deposit banks are owned by criminals and the contents are the proceeds of crimes.

In March of 2011 the British Prime Minister David Cameron ordered British police to execute Operation Rize - raid and seize the entire contents (art, gold ingots, gold dust, jewelery and cash) of nearly 7,000 safety deposit boxes from three vaults in London. The British government simply told Scotland Yard that the safety deposit boxes were used by criminals to store cash, guns and drugs.
The British government instructed the police to arrest anyone who went to the vaults to try and recover the contents of their safety deposit boxes. Those who protested the seizure of the contents of their safety deposit boxes were to be charged with various offenses including pedophilia, money-laundering, drug-dealing and firearms possession.

When word spread about the government raid and theft of the contents of their safety deposit boxes people rushed to the bank vaults. The police arrested 146 and charged 30 (those with the most cash and gold in their safety deposit boxes) with trumped up pedophilia, money-laundering, drug-dealing and firearms charges....."

[Magda Hassan]

No idea Ed. I have seen it posted here and there too and wondered the same. I think Jan and Peter P may be able to tell us more when they come on line. I do find that the article is very short on details. It did remind me of a real event along these lines which was made into a bloody good movie called The Bank Job http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bank_Job and I highly recommend it if you get the opportunity.:popcorn::thumbsup:

[Jan Klimkowski]

Here are a couple of more detailed articles.

At the superficial level, the story is about the limits of the UK's 2002 Proceeds Of Crime Act (POCA). Technically, POCA facilitates "confiscation orders against convicted individuals (requiring payment to the State based upon the benefit obtained from their crimes), civil recovery of proceeds of crime from unconvicted individuals, taxation of profits generated from crime, UK anti-money laundering legislation, powers of investigation into suspected proceeds of crime offences, and international co-operation by UK law enforcement agencies against money laundering".

In short, it is a way of police officers seizing assets which they believe they can prove have been gained through criminal activity.

Did Operation Rize have deep political layers? Quite possibly.

Operation Rize - the inside story on the Met's biggest-ever sting

Charlotte Eager
8 Apr 2011

No 3 Park Street is an innocuous black door behind The Dorchester hotel. No safety deposit centre likes to advertise itself to thieves. Only it wasn't burglars who broke into the three branches of the Safe Deposit Centres Ltd, in Mayfair, Edgware and Hampstead, at 3pm on 2 June 2008, but Metropolitan Police officers carrying out simultaneous armed raids.

No one answers the Park Street door now - the premises are closed. There is nothing today to give any indication of the mad scramble nearly four years ago when 500 officers in flak jackets swarmed through London in convoys of shiny black 4x4s. Waving warrants, the police forced the Safe Deposit Centres' staff to open up the doors to the vaults. It was one of the largest operations in the history of the Met.

The 6,717 boxes took 11 days to empty, each Safe Deposit premises being turned into a makeshift evidence room as officers, with diamond-tipped drills and angle-grinders, broke into every box. Half were empty, but 3,554 boxes were found to contain, as well as cash and jewellery, stashes of child pornography, false passports, gold, pure cocaine, ivory, firearms, and guns subsequently linked to murders. Operation Rize has been hailed as a great coup. 'The sheer volume of money concerned - £53 million in cash, of which £12.5 million so far has been subsequently seized by the courts,' was the first response from Detective Chief Inspector (now Superintendent) Mark Ponting of Scotland Yard, when asked what he thought made Rize so successful.

So far 250 court appearances have led to 30 convictions, with more in the pipeline. Box 3892 at Edgware Safe Depository, rented in the name of John Derriviere, contained a Brockock hand gun, nine rounds of ammunition, drugs and about £20,000 in cash. Derriviere was convicted of firearms, drugs and money-laundering offences in September 2009 and sentenced to eight years. The box belonging to 49-year-old Yuri Harris, who had previous convictions for stealing lug-gage at Gatwick and Heathrow airports and in Switzerland, contained £101,176.76 made up of sterling, dollars, yen, Swiss francs and Thai baht. As he'd never paid any tax, his cash was taken by the state in lieu.

Another box contained 140g of cocaine and £62,500 in cash. Yafet Berhane, a suspected drug dealer, was jailed in March 2009 after £122,000 was found in his box; 45-year-old Gavin Leon was jailed for five years after a Glock 9mm semi-automatic was discovered in his Hampstead box; David Wilson, 39, already serving two years for drug-dealing, turned out to have £100,000 in cash hidden away. Another box, 2585, belonging to a Michael Geraghty, the proprietor of a sex shop called Fettered Pleasure in Islington, held thousands of indecent images of children. This led to the breaking of a paedophile ring and Geraghty was sentenced to 15 months for possessing and making indecent images in March 2010.

Last month the two directors, Milton Woolf and Jacqueline Swan, and one former director of the company, Leslie Sieff, whom the Yard felt had enabled this bonanza of crime, were convicted and sentenced at Southwark Crown Court. Fifty-five-year-old Woolf, of Golders Green, was sentenced to four years and six months after pleading guilty to 14 offences, including money-laundering and possession of a firearm. Forty-seven-year-old Swan, who lived in Barnet, was sentenced to a year for seven offences of failing to disclose money-laundering. Sixty-three-year-old Sieff, of West Hampstead, was given a £1,000 fine and ordered to pay £750 costs after admitting possession of $60,000 in counterfeit US dollars. He is currently recovering on a cruise.

Yet the true story of Operation Rize reveals something far more chilling - a virtually un-noticed change in the law that strikes at the very heart of the British justice system. Under the Proceeds of Crime Act of 2002 (known as POCA), valuables and cash above £1,000 are presumed by the police to be the proceeds of crime, unless you can prove otherwise, a total reversal of the presumption of innocence. Aside from those three dozen or so people found guilty, the vast majority of the 3,500-plus box owners have turned out to be innocent. Yet their money was confiscated, and in many cases is still being held, by the Metropolitan Police or the Inland Revenue. The owners have spent nearly three years and thousands of pounds in uncompensated legal fees having to justify why they kept their personal belongings in safety deposit boxes and how they came by them in the first place. Worse still, when people have had their belongings returned, in some cases cash and jewellery has been missing.

Many of the box owners were Jewish or Asian; their families had fled Nazi Germany, escaped the bloodbath of post- partition India, or been thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin. 'These are people who have a history of having to move fast,' says Siobhan Egan of Lewis Nedas, the London solicitors who represented over 100 of the box owners. 'Many had come to the end of their business lives. They traditionally keep cash and jewellery quite legitimately.' Lewis Nedas put an advertisement in The Jewish Chronicle and was inundated with responses from outraged Jewish pensioners. 'A client of mine had a great deal of jewellery taken, another had £100,000 in cash, another £120,000,' says Egan.

'Most of our clients were from classic immigration backgrounds - Jewish, Asian and Chinese - where cash and jewellery are the norm,' says Allen Yhearm, of the forensic accountants Appleton Richardson & Co, which has spent the last three years helping its clients to prove that they own their own property. 'Of course there were elements of criminality,' says Yhearm, 'but go to the safety deposits in any major bank and you'd find just the same thing.'

'When do you interfere in the rights of privacy and property of the many to catch a few?' asks David Sonn of Sonn Macmillan Walker, another firm of lawyers that represented many of the victims. When I said to Superintendent Mark Ponting that I assumed in Britain you were innocent until found guilty, he said: 'Well, you're not. Everything we did was within the legislation.'

As well as elderly refugees and their heirs, among the box owners were High Court judges, aristocratic English ladies hiding their rocks from their ex-husbands' solicitors, even senior police-men. The Rabbi of Mill Hill Synagogue, Yitzchak Schochet, had a box: 'I thought safety deposit boxes were supposed to be private,' he says.

There was a massive cultural divide between the police and the depositors. Regardless of ethnic background, the rich keep their money in all sorts of different places and like to spread it around to minimise risk. But that's hard to explain to the average 19-year-old DC. 'The police were amazed,' says one lawyer who worked with the victims. 'They just assumed all the owners would be crooks and no one would ask for their possessions back. In fact they were mobbed by furious citizens.'

Legally, the warrant appears somewhat dubious - the police only had three warrants to search 6,717 boxes and each one was an individual's private, leased property. 'I can't understand why they didn't just get a warrant for the boxes they wanted to open,' says a former employee at the Safe Deposit Centres. 'We've always given them access with a warrant before. It's like knocking off an entire block of flats just because you've got a burglar living in one flat.' 'It was a fishing expedition,' says another lawyer. 'And the police in this country are specifically forbidden to do that.'

The Met had to go 'judge-shopping' to find one who'd grant the warrants, as the original application was rejected by Southwark Crown Court, the Met's normal court. Every lawyer ES spoke to was keen to reiterate how unusual this is. The Met turned to Judge Kenneth Macrae, of Croydon, now retired. Statistical information, the Met told him, suggested that 90 per cent of the boxes would be linked to crime.

In fact, even if the other 250 pending cases result in convictions, that still only brings the conviction rate to 10 per cent. Unsurprisingly, the seizure of the boxes has been challenged. There were two judicial reviews of Operation Rize: one by the law firm Lewis Nedas on behalf of its clients; the other on behalf of a Russian businessman, Alexander Temerko, who had fled Russia because his former boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of Yukos Oil and once Russia's richest man, had been jailed by Putin for eight years. In both cases, the police settled and returned the property before the judicial reviews finished going through the courts. 'They didn't want their warrants being questioned,' says one of the lawyers.

Most of the safe deposit customers have had to deal with, at best, endless bureaucracy: finding receipts for inherited jewellery and justifying cash. One family had to get its diamonds analysed to prove that they had been cut before 1939. 'The police wanted them to prove their story that they'd been smuggled out of Germany. It cost a great deal of money,' explains Mark Richards, also with Appleton Richardson & Co.

In many cases, once the police had admitted the loot was not the proceeds of crime, they handed it over to the Inland Revenue. 'The second phase was all about money going to the Revenue. They were begging us to get our clients to let them keep the money and set it off against tax,' says Egan. 'We said if they wanted a loan, they could pay us five per cent. The Revenue opened an account so that clients could transfer money from their box directly to the Revenue. Sometimes the Met got heavy and said that if our clients didn't hand over the money they would prosecute.' In many cases, the Revenue is keeping the money on the grounds not only that tax is due on it, but also that the cash's owners must have been dodging taxes for years. 'They were told they'd just been unlucky getting caught this time,' says a lawyer. '£13 million has been returned to the public purse,' says Ponting. When contacted, the Revenue refused to comment. However, it denied that its officers were on a percentage incentive scheme for cash collection, although it did admit that successful officers get bonuses.

At worst, the cases deteriorated into serious intimidation. One man, an estate agent who does not wish to be named, was arrested after the police discovered £141,000 in cash in his box: it had been given to him on his wedding day by his great-aunt, who had escaped Germany in 1940 with diamonds sewn into her clothes. She converted the money into cash in the UK. 'It was the family running-away fund; she gave it to me as I was the eldest son. I never thought of it as my money. It just sat in the box. After what happened to the Jewish people, my grandfather told me to save it for a rainy day,' he says.

The police, however, arrested his brother-in-law, who was also his business partner. They raided his home, threatened to arrest his wife and forbade his brother-in-law to speak to him. 'They tried to say I had been ripping off home-owners,' he says. 'They couldn't understand why the money wasn't in a bank account.' The police failed to make any allowances for the fact that the raids happened at the height of the financial crisis: the banking system was going into meltdown, interest rates were below one per cent. Northern Rock had collapsed the previous year, and Bradford & Bingley was on the point of bankruptcy. After two years, the police - finally admitting his money wasn't the proceeds of crime - promptly handed it over to the Revenue, but £1,200 was missing. 'The Revenue wrote to say it had received £139,800.20. I had all these documents from the police saying £141,000. I rang them to ask what was going on, and they said that they had never checked the money.' He's yet to get his cash back from the Revenue, which is now interested in whether his great- aunt paid duty on the diamonds she saved from the Nazis.

Another Jewish depositor described how a 'large gold cocktail ring and a baby's bracelet' had been missing when her property was returned to her, as well as £8,000 in cash. But when the police showed her a film to prove their innocence, she says, the tape was doctored: 'The film was cut, and then was taken from another camera angle, and the time code was missing on the second tape.' Another North London goldsmith claims that £10,000 and his wife's diamond earrings were missing. 'None of the complaints have ever been upheld,' says Ponting.

Nor have any of those who have received their property back ever been offered compensation for legal and accountancy fees. 'They can make claims through the courts. It's catered for in legislation,' says Ponting. Yet neither their lawyers nor the box owners seem aware of this. As of last month, the three directors of Safe Deposit Centres Ltd have been sentenced, yet the firearm that Woolf was also convicted of possessing was in one of the boxes, rather than his own. The counterfeit $60,000 Sieff was convicted of holding was the result of a crime perpetrated against him in 1996. A client changed the money at their bureau de change and when Sieff dis-covered it was fake, he put it into the company safe deposit box and left it there.

Ponting claims the police had identified the company as 'a criminal enabler', yet the results belie that, with only 0.5 per cent of the boxes being so far linked to crime. Many of the lawyers and accountants involved seem to think that Rize was just a revenue-raising operation. 'The minutes of Operation Rize look like a business meeting,' says one.

There are those who claim Rize must have made a loss, with all the officers and overtime, but Ponting says the cost so far is only £10 million, including the investigations that have arisen from Rize: 'A huge amount of money we confiscated was linked to tax evasion,' he says. Interestingly, the Met is allowed to keep between 18 per cent and 50 per cent of the cash it seizes, depending on the circumstances. 'It's how the Met are going to pay for the policing of the Olympics,' claims another lawyer. ES

Chamber of secrets

It was the biggest raid in Metropolitan Police history, involving 500 officers and the discovery of more than £35m in cash. But when the officers broke open 6,717 safe deposit boxes in June last year they didn't realise they were unlocking a controversy over the right to freedom and privacy.

Simon Garfield The Observer, Sunday 2 August 2009

Nigel Mawer is a large policeman with heavy responsibilities. As acting commander of the Metropolitan Police Specialist Crime Directorate, in recent years his work has encompassed internet fraud protection, child abuse, the cash-for-honours enquiry and the identification of victims after the London bombings. In June 2008, he commenced another spectacular investigation, called Operation Rize - a series of raids on London's privately owned safe deposit boxes. The operation involved almost 500 officers and cost more than £1m, and as he describes the intricacies of its planning, a process that took 18 months of surveillance, you might believe Mawer had seen too many Gene Hackman films. You might also believe something you may not have thought since the age of four: that police work is fun.

Mawer's office computer at New Scotland Yard contains a document which summarises the results of the raids: guns, cocaine, cannabis, forged passports, all denominations of cash, gold, gold dust, jewellery, Dutch paintings, forged banking material and counterfeit bonds. There were also unusual things, such as a builder's hammer, chisel and a pipe wrench wrapped in a cloth, contained in a box that hadn't been opened for 10 years.

The cash amounted to more than £35m. The contents led to ongoing investigations into money laundering, drug dealing, tax fraud, paedophilia, burglary and possession of firearms - almost 1,000 cases in many countries - and Mawer estimates it may take up to 10 years to complete all his intended prosecutions. Operation Rize is the most complex series of raids in Metropolitan Police history, and despite relatively few convictions to date, it may turn out to be one of its most successful. By targeting the smallest of things - a metal container often no bigger than a cereal box - the police claim they have revealed and disrupted a huge world of criminality. But only now, a little more than a year after the raids, is the full story of Operation Rize beginning to emerge. Some of it is indeed a Gene Hackman movie; other parts may suggest something less engaging, and more Orwellian.

The Hampstead Safe Depository located at 575 Finchley Road looks a little like banks before they became concerned about image - dull and foreboding. It sits near the turn-off for the North Circular and M1, the end of a commercial parade that also offers an estate agent and a convenience store. Beyond its glass doors there is a small entrance hall with a sofa where a visitor may wait before visiting their box in the storerooms below, and as they sit they are observed by CCTV. It is a calm place; it is difficult to imagine it under armed police siege.

Mawer and his colleagues had been suspicious of the place for a while - they talked of it as a "key crime enabler". Traditionally, a safe deposit box has always been a place where anything may be kept undeclared from public view, and traditionally the police have always regarded such places with suspicion. "If you're a criminal you can store your pension in there," Mawer says. In recent years, the big banks have gradually closed their safe deposit facilities, finding them not only unprofitable, but also hard to justify in the face of the government's increasingly stringent money laundering regulations. But the private depositories have flourished accordingly, not least Safe Deposit Centres Ltd (SDCL), set up in 1986 with the promise not only of secure premises and a large range of storage options (beginning with an A4-size shallow box for around £100), but also the prospect of discretion and full insurance cover for contents. "If you looked at their original website they basically said, 'No questions asked'," Mawer tells me. "They also offered a money service bureau, post point and safe depository - all the services that criminals actually need. From a laundering perspective it's fantastic. You can move money and change money, you can access it and it's a mail drop as well if you want that to be your business address. So it's quite a nice enterprise..." SDCL set up in Hampstead, and then expanded to Edgware and Mayfair. The more people felt they had to protect or hide, the better they did.

To control the flow of illegality, the managers of safe depositories have been obliged by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) to register their business and report any suspicious behaviour by their customers. But this has only been law since December 2007. The Metropolitan Police has for several years also maintained its own outreach programme with safe depositories, attempting to build up a trusting relationship. Mawer says that although some companies have been accommodating, SDCL was less so ("probably the worst response we got"), and had failed to register with the FSA or report any suspicious activity. His department first approached SDCL three years ago, and began surveillance of its three premises not long afterwards. Solicitors for SDCL refute Mawer's claim, stating that the company has always followed clear industry guidelines.

Operation Rize is a meaningless title, merely the next codename from an automatically generated list at New Scotland Yard. "What was really unfortunate," Mawer says, "was that it turned out to be a town in Turkey, and we didn't know that. They were very upset that we tainted their town." "Now we're doing rocks," says DCI Mark Ponting. "And musical instruments - like Operation Glockenspiel." But the name Operation Rize has since become famous for something else: it marked a legal precedent.

Mawer's ambitions - "We wanted to open every box" - would have been regarded as impossible only three years before, but a change in the law worked in their favour. The Proceeds of Crime Act (2002) allowed for a raid to be conducted on an entire set of premises if enough evidence could be gathered to show that at least some of it was harbouring criminal activity; no longer would a warrant be required to search every room or office, or in this case every box. But because the police could have no advance knowledge about each box holder's property, legitimate or otherwise, the raids would represent an unprecedented development of police practice: to a large extent their actions would be based on guesswork.

The first step was to convince a judge at Croydon Crown Court that the raids would be in the public interest. "This wasn't just a fag-packet job," Ponting told me. "We used all the techniques you'd expect: 24-hour manned surveillance, CCTV, surveillance of the owners, and in the course of that the comings and goings of the box holders." The police gathered evidence on about 200 box holders over 18 months, about a third of whom were suspected of illegal activity. A statistician then extrapolated these findings for the judge, who needed to be convinced that a stringent policy was in place to ensure innocent box holders would be reunited with their property as swiftly as possible.

The warrant application ran to several hundred pages; when it was granted, three weeks before the raids occurred, many other logistical challenges arose. The police had to establish their legal position in the event that claims were made against them by box holders; a secure storage facility had to be found to house an estimated £100m worth of assets; a hotline and information campaign was arranged to handle thousands of enquiries. Then there was the difficulty of breaking into the boxes, and the operation began resembling yet another film, this time by Guy Ritchie. After trying several techniques on dummy boxes, the police chose the sort of angle grinder you would buy at a DIY store, and cut straight lines by the side of the hinges; each box took about two minutes to open. (Another option, drilling the lock, would prove quicker, but would also destroy evidence; if a key was later found in a suspect's possession, it would be the surest way of linking someone to a box's contents.)

Secrecy within the police was another issue. For most of the 500 officers involved, the details of the operation were only revealed when they gathered at an army briefing room on 2 June, the morning of the raids; previously they were only aware they would be required to work the day or night shift for up to a fortnight. A large proportion of the Met's armed officers were required at the three sites and in the transport of money from the premises. "It would have been rather embarrassing if people had turned up with guns and walked in and emptied the depository while we were there," Mawer says. "And very embarrassing if our lorry got robbed en route to the secure store."

They began breaking in at about 3.30pm.

The boxes took 11 days to empty, but such was the haul that a detailed inventory of contents wasn't completed until November. The opening of every box was conducted under a strict protocol. Each of the officers wore forensic suits, with their actions videoed from above and the side. Once the box was removed and checked for explosives, it was levered open and the contents laid on a table for a draft listing; exact quantities of money would only be counted once the contents were labelled, bagged and removed to the secure storage. "The searching conditions were appalling for those officers doing those 12-hour shifts," Mawer recalls. "The lights baking hot, June was a hot month anyway." But at least the work was eventful: "I can remember being in the premises and someone opening a box and saying disappointedly, 'Oh gosh, it's only half-full of money.' You can get quite blase about it."

All told, 6,717 boxes were opened. Of these, 3,549 were seized. The owners of 849 boxes are subject to further enquiries, while the contents of 2,677 have since been restored. As of 23 June 2009, £24.73m has been "detained" pending further investigations and £4.24m has been received by the Inland Revenue. (Of the boxes that were restored, 764 were suspected of having tax irregularities connected with them; a proportion of box owners immediately admitted underpayment of tax, and agreed to pay their stored cash to the Revenue ahead of any criminal proceedings.)

Ponting says that only now is his team concentrating on "top-level" money laundering investigations and the links to drugs dealing. To date, only 45 arrests have been made, and 13 charges brought, but for public relations purposes he has compiled an eye-catching list of successful prosecutions and pending investigations. Some are unnerving, a few are baffling, and others faintly comical.

There is the case of Gavin Leon, 44, whose box was held under a false name at Hampstead Safe Depository and contained a 9mm Glock pistol, cocaine, MDMA and cannabis; he pleaded guilty and was imprisoned for five years for possession of a firearm and a total of 45 months for drugs offences. There was the case of Yaset Berhane, 27, whose box at Park Lane held £122,000 in cash, some of it in marked notes from a drugs sting mounted some months before by the Sussex Police; he was sentenced in March to three years for drug trafficking and two years for money laundering. David Wilson, 38, already under investigation for supplying drugs, was sentenced to two years. Operation Rize revealed £100,000 in a safe deposit box at Edgware, since confiscated, that would have been available on Wilson's release from prison.

Then there was the case of an unnamed person who had £950,000 in a box in the Edgware depository, believed linked to the taxi industry. There were two men arrested after their box at the Park Lane depository revealed an envelope with indecent photographs of children and discs of digital images. There was a box at Hampstead containing £150,000 held by a woman who claimed the money derived from incapacity benefits, although she was later arrested for her part in a London vice ring.

There were the large bags of gold flakes and small nuggets that took two officers to lift, and stolen Dutch paintings that are still being investigated, alongside historical artefacts believed to be from the Middle East. At Hampstead, a box containing a chisel and other builder's tools had no registered owner: "There is clearly a story behind these items; to retain it within a secure facility heightens the suspicion." The majority of the finds came from boxes no larger than a laptop case, but some were stored in lockers containing holdalls and plastic bags. Ponting's list also contained items found at further raids on suspects' homes, such as more drugs, more forged documents, and elephant tusks valued at £40,000.

The day before I met Ponting he had received details of a successful conviction involving a man with several identities. "Only 18 months," he said, "but in the box the individual had a Nigerian passport in his name with a photograph on, a Spanish passport, different name but same photograph, Norwegian passport, different name same photograph, UK passport same name same photograph, Lebanese birth certificate in his name, UK provisional driving licence in a different name. Also, about £100,000, and we've identified six properties in the UK, USA, South Africa and Spain, which are all restrained, so he can't move the money...

"The reality is, whatever you think would be in there is in there," Ponting says. "Everything. Every conceivable form of criminality... Let's be honest, it's been an absolute success."

Others would disagree. The world that Operation Rize uncovered was more than just a repository of criminality; it was also a world of domesticity. Because of the premises' locations, a large proportion of the boxes had Jewish owners, and contained many items of jewellery, gold and other family heirlooms brought to England at the time of the Holocaust; there was also a trend to leave considerable quantities of cash. London's Asians and other minority groups also used the SDCL's premises for secure temporary storage.

The Serious Crime Directorate maintains it has always regarded the return of legitimate property in Operation Rize as its first priority, but this is not how its results are judged. The disruption caused to almost 2,000 box holders with legitimate contents involved not only the effort required to reclaim their own goods, but also an unusual burden of proof. Having filled a box with any items without question over the past two decades, it was now up to the owners to show they were not acting beyond the law. Ponting told me he was "desperate" to reunite seized property with its rightful owners, and that his department made strenuous efforts through local media and community groups to alert people to the correct procedure. "Is what they've got in [the box] reasonable and is the explanation reasonable and is it corroborated? If it is, you've got it back."

But the process of restoration has not always been straightforward. "We anticipated all the calls from innocent box holders wanting their contents back," says Mawer. "But what we didn't anticipate was all the bad guys calling us up, too. 'I'm going on holiday this weekend and I need my passport.' And when you opened the box up there wasn't even a passport in it. There was a phenomenal amount of people who were concerned about the contents who were desperately trying to lie to us to get it back. It swamped the call centre. If it had only been legitimate calls we would have managed."

Mawer is fond of one particular call his office received regarding the return of jewellery. "It was needed for a wedding in India that weekend, so we fast-tracked the box and got it to the family in time. But there's a network out there, so every single other person who also had jewellery in a box also came in and said that they also had a wedding in India that weekend." (Owners received no compensation for the disruption, but were offered free storage for a year on police premises.)

As so often with criminal activity, the chief beneficiaries of Operation Rize may be the lawyers. Several firms have been engaged by box holders to assist them in the restoration of their property or defend themselves against allegations that their contents are suspicious. "There are a lot of very angry people," one solicitor told me on the condition of anonymity. "When you start renting a box you have to fill out a simple form and produce some ID, and you don't expect to have to prove the contents are yours perhaps years later. If you have a quantity of cash which you have saved legitimately, it can be very hard to remember exactly how you came by it."

And so Operation Rize has turned from a dramatic large-scale raid into an issue of daily freedoms. Solicitors will now argue the civil liberties case in court, questioning to what extent a law-abiding public should suffer in the name of diligence and safety. While disruption is tolerated at airports and the entrance to public buildings, how should we check new encroachments lest they become the norm? In the case of Operation Rize, they may reasonably argue that public disruption and cost has been a secondary consideration in pursuit of money laundering. "We know we've had a significant effect on serious and organised crime both nationally and internationally," Mawer told me, but he admits this is a hard thing to quantify.

When the Daily Mail ran a story about Operation Rize a few days after the raids in June 2008, its website asked readers for their comments. They were varied. "The ultimate in big brother," concluded Allan from Poole. "What next, raid everyone's houses in the excuse of searching for criminals? Surely they should have needed a warrant for each box. After spending two years investigating they should know who they are going after. This country gets scarier and scarier every day." Janet from Bromley commented on a "brilliant job - well done to the police, who are doing this fantastic work which hopefully will deter these greedy crooks." Tyler Dobson from Austin USA thought "Orwell is alive and well in the UK," while S Nisbet from Seaton wrote, "Now this is in the open, I'm just waiting to hear from the Human Rights mob and Cherie's chambers cashing in with more court cases at our expense..."

So where should one put one's valuables now? For an organisation that depends on secrecy and concealment to work effectively, the police force has always frowned upon institutions and individuals who do likewise, and has always regarded those in possession of large amounts of cash as the probable beneficiary of illegal activity. But we live in turbulent times, and since the run on Northern Rock in September 2007, those who for a lifetime have kept money in the banks and building societies have looked for other, less volatile possibilities; with negligible interest rates for savers, the safe deposit box has become a realistic option.

Perhaps Operation Rize has destroyed this possibility, or perhaps it has made legitimate storage safer. The FSA has sharper teeth since the raids exposed wrongdoing; there is talk of installing cameras even in the private rooms where customers open their boxes. "We've changed the face of the industry," Mawer says. (In June's birthday honours, he was awarded the Queen's Police Medal.) "The question is, where will the criminals go next? Some will keep it under the mattress. Some will bodypack it out of the country, and you've also got things like the Big Yellow self-store."

But at the Hampstead Safe Depository everything appears to be running smoothly again, and it is believed to be complying with FSA regulations. Its solictors say they "are fully co-operating, and will continue to do so, with the current investigation." Its three directors, arrested on suspicion of money laundering, are bailed until their appearance at a London police station in the second week of September.

The visitor to the Finchley Road premises today is greeted by a young woman who runs through the business of renting a new box with some enthusiasm. The first door will be opened by a security guard, the next by your swipecard and pincode, she explains. There are two unique keys to your box, and if you lose one you forfeit the £100 deposit as a replacement is made; if you lose both, the lock will be drilled and a new one inserted, but that can get expensive. The place is open 362 days a year. You need a passport and a recent utility bill. The smallest available boxes have gone up in size and price - a 305 x 480 x 60mm document box now costs £30 per month or £180 per year plus VAT. Beneath the gaze of many cameras, the assistant walks downstairs to explain how the keys work, and the boxes are all pristine.

At the end of my visit she gives me a leaflet showing prices and opening times, but it was a little out of date. At the top was a logo of a heavily barred gate guarded by two centurions, an image that might have come from a medieval colouring book. There was also a paragraph that had been scribbled out about the provision of "free and low cost insurance up to £30,000" (they now offered no insurance at all). And then there was the old slogan beneath the company name. "Convenient confidential safekeeping" it read - none of it as true as it was.

[Ed Jewett]

Thanks for the articles, Jan. The op as history was real. But the opening line of the article suggested it is happening again (? at a time of the London riots, too?). Is it happening again? There is a lot of fear-mongering (or is it reality?) that the government will step in and seize safety deposit boxes here in the USofA, and that it will step in and seize pensions, 401(k)s, etc., and that it will cease/seize/freeze Social Security and Medicare. What's a nervous nellie to do? These days, you can't even pack $40,000 of your own money in a suitcase and take it down the road without having it seized.