THE Provisional IRA’s chief of staff is suspected of using the proceeds of organised crime to invest in a portfolio of 250 properties in Manchester and the North West of England, according to financial investigators.

The Assets Recovery Agency (ARA), assisted by police, carried out raids yesterday aimed at closing down an alleged outlet for IRA money-laundering.

The searches, in Manchester and Cheshire, occurred as Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, met Tony Blair at Downing Street for talks on the future of the Northern Ireland peace process.

The operation comes after the IRA’s disarmament and is a signal that the authorities will not permit it to switch from terrorist group to criminal syndicate.

Investigators searched offices and homes in an inquiry aimed at tracing who owns the properties, valued at £30 million, and where the money to buy them came from.

The ARA refused to identify its main target but sources confirmed that the focus is Thomas “Slab” Murphy, the IRA’s chief of staff who has been described in an underworld rich list as Britain’s richest smuggler.

The ARA said officially that it was searching the homes and offices of two Manchester businessmen — thought to be Mr Murphy and Dermot Craven — linked with property management companies. The agency swooped after obtaining search and seizure warrants and a disclosure order in private hearings at the High Court in London.

The investigation is aimed at money laundered by “IRA plc”. The terrorists are believed to have invested money, obtained through criminal activity in the Irish Republic, in property in Manchester and the North West.

The IRA has made hundreds of millions of pounds from smuggling, counterfeit crime and robbery — including last year’s £26 million Northern Bank raid — and is believed to have laundered it around the world. But the suggestion that about £9 million was deposited to obtain mortgages on a property portfolio in England is a surprise to investigators.

A spokesman for the ARA said it would be interviewing people under powers that compel them to answer questions. Failure to answer or giving misleading information is an offence carrying a maximum penalty of six months in jail.

Police in the Irish Republic said last night that officers from the Criminal Assets Bureau had been working with the ARA for months on the Manchester investigation and other inquiries. The Gardai said the searches were conducted at professional offices, during which a quantity of documentary material was seized.

One source said that investigators on both sides of the Irish border had planned to seize assets allegedly connected with Mr Murphy but had been hampered by political concerns and fears of terrorist reprisals. “The key to these raids is decommissioning,” the source said. “We have had information about his financial empire for ages but it was difficult to hit him because of fear that it would trigger a series of events”.

Mr Adams, speaking at Downing Street, said that the timing of the raids was “obviously a political agenda at work”. But Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland Secretary, dismissed Mr Adams’s allegation. He said: “Whether the ARA knew about the meetings today I rather doubt. Certainly their activities are quite independent of any political negotiations that have been taking place.”

Unionists have claimed that the Government has in recent years “gone soft” on the Provisionals in order to lure them into giving up the gun.

There is alarm in Dublin, too, that with the official end of the armed campaign but the IRA still intact, its Mafia-style empire could end up subverting democracy in the Republic.

Michael McDowell, the Irish Justice Minister, said that there was extensive co-operation with the ARA’s investigations. He said: “There is a joint determination to ensure that the border is not something behind which criminals can hide.”

THOMAS 'SLAB' MURPHY

• Smuggler, PIRA Army Council. Strongly built, 5ft 11in. Balding. An Irish Police Special Branch profile written in 1998 of Thomas Murphy chose to give precedence to his financial activities over his leadership of the Provisional IRA
  
  
• A batchelor and multimillionaire, courtesy of his smuggling empire on the Irish border in South Armagh, he has been under security forces scrutiny for more than three decades
  
  
• Still wanted for terrorist offences in Northern Ireland, he was born in 1949 and made his first fortune as a pig smuggler, later in oil smuggling
  
  
• By the 1990s Murphy was regarded by MI5 to be the single biggest domestic threat to the UK. The chain of army observation posts across South Armagh now being dismantled contains two that provide 24-hour observation of his farm

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