BRITAIN’S ten richest villains are worth more than a billion pounds between them but the government agency set up to strip these underworld kingpins of their fortunes admits that it cannot get its hands on their wealth.

While a record £60 million worth of fast cars, luxury homes and jewellery was clawed back from British villains in the past year, the “super criminals” remain untouchable.

Some are behind bars but they hired skilled financiers to hide their fortunes through complex offshore accounts and property deals — known in villain circles as smurfing.

New laws were supposed to give police, Customs and the Assets Recovery Agency power to target the “Mr Bigs”, but senior figures have told The Times that Britain’s crime barons are still beyond their grasp. Without a massive injection of government cash and skilled personnel, one senior Scotland Yard source conceded: “These big-time villains will continue to run financial rings around us.”

Experts predict that they will seize £260 million over three years. This is still less than the £300 million fortune of Britain’s richest criminal, John Palmer, who is said to be wealthier than the Queen. The drug trade in Britain alone is said to be worth £50 billion.

There have been successes this year, with Scotland Yard recovering £14.8 million last year from villains in London.

Half of that came in 122 cash seizures, the rest from assets including two Ferraris each worth £100,000 taken from the fraudster John Fabregas, who was jailed with his parents after the trio made an estimated £2.5 million from a fake investment scheme.

Police recently seized a £450,000 four-bedroom house in Wembley Park that a Nigerian-born fraudster, Olushola Odukale, bought for cash in 1996.

Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, the head of Scotland Yard’s Specialist Crime Directorate, said they had joined forces with Customs and other police forces in Operation Payback to “concentrate resources on mounting proactive and reactive operations against criminals with suspicious lifestyles”.

Last week customs officers obtained a confiscation order from Kingston Crown Court for £7.1 million from Monmohan Singh Sandu, who was jailed for seven years for a £16 million VAT fraud.

This month a judge at Hove Crown Court issued a confiscation order for £3.2 million against Dutch-born Peter Versluis, caught by Customs smuggling cocaine into Britain.

Another breakthrough this month came when a High Court judge granted the Assets Recovery Agency its first civil recovery order, allowing it to confiscate £16,049 from Billy Liversage, a convicted Liverpool drug trafficker.

He had fought a legal battle to quash a confiscation order on the ground that a portion of his assets could not be attributed to his drug dealing — which he admitted to — but were proceeds from other unlawful activities that he had not been convicted for. This included smuggling cigarettes.

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