Garda headquarters are developing close ties with police in Bangkok to stop the ‘flow of money’ stolen from unsuspecting victims of deceptive crimes in Ireland to the Thai capital.
Arda Commissioner Drew Harris said this “long-term” operation is part of an expansion of the Garda Liaison Officer (GLO) Network, deploying senior gardai in Europe, America, Middle East, Southeast Asia, Australia and Colombia.
It is part of an effort to “connect” with local law enforcement agencies to try and thwart Irish and foreign gangs involved in drugs, murder, cheating, cryptocurrency theft, financial fraud and other crimes.
Harris spoke at the graduation of 54 new gardai, including officers from Russia, Tajikistan, Poland, Mauritius, Iraq and England, at Garda Training College in Templemore, Co Tipperar.
He said Gardai “must have an international base because we are always involved in organized crime and always looking for those who are involved in it”.
The new ties to Bangkok “are in fact respectful of our concerns about the flow of money through criminal assets worldwide, in terms of tracking large-scale fraud, and money defrauded from individuals through various forms of deception, which then goes to the banking system,” said Mr Harris.
“If we’re in strategic places, around the world, we can make a real difference in terms of interdicting movements of criminal finance.”
Attorney General Helen McEntee has also approved a new GLO post in Abu Dhabi as a gardai pursuing members of the Kinahan drug cartel, which is also involved in a plethora of Irish gangland murders.
“The overall purpose of this is to establish connections with law enforcement officers around the world, and where we have placed the Garda Liaison Officers we have always benefited and really benefited from the amount of information leading to investigations and bringing individuals to justice here in Ireland , or even in other jurisdictions,” said Mr Harris.
The “primary function of the GLO is to support us in the field of organized crime, terrorism; we already have a good network in Europe which is well established, we moved to the United States of America in 2020 and we moved to Bogota last year and those are very important implementations for us.”
“Bogota has been very important, and just practically having someone to make the connections with local law enforcement, but also with the other network of liaison officers, it makes a big difference and it puts us on a global stage.”
Mr Harris also encouraged the public to continue tipping the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) about other people flaunting vast amounts of wealth without any apparent income.
“People see things, notice, in fact wealth has been shown, which is actually hard to understand how an individual could display this wealth, even in terms of their personal belongings, what they do with their house, the cars they own. own or drive. So please tell us, tell CAB and we now have a very extensive network of local asset considerations and investigations,” said Mr Harris.
“We are not just after the ‘Mr. Bigs’, important as they are, we are chasing middle class dealers and taking their riches from them where they were obtained from crime.”