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May.02, 2010

CRIME gangs are muscling in on children's nurseries as a money-laundering front for their illegal activities, police chiefs have warned.

Detectives are investigating up to a dozen nurseries in the west of Scotland believed to be linked with gangsters, Scotland on Sunday has learned.

Sources said they believed the businesses were laundering funds from drugs and extortion rackets by creating "ghost children", youngsters shown on their books to be in their care but who do not exist and whose fictitious parents pay in cash.

Senior officers last night said they were determined "to nip in the bud" attempts by crime figures to make the same inroads into childcare as they have done in security, private hire taxis and tanning companies.

One suggested about 12 nurseries in and around Glasgow had been infiltrated. Another said gangsters had made moves on similar businesses in every major Scottish urban centre.

Assistant Chief Constable George Hamilton of Strathclyde Police said: "We believe the whole service industry is vulnerable to organised criminals trying to launder money, whether that is the security industry, taxis, car washes, tanning salons or children's day nurseries. We are talking about cleaning up money from extortion, drugs, counterfeit goods, intellectual property crime – usually those £1.50 pirated DVDS – and firearms."

Hamilton, who chairs Strathclyde's crime strategy group, stressed that daycare offered particularly lucrative opportunities for "clean skins" associated with gangsters, including wives, girlfriends, mothers and daughters, because of the nature of the industry.

He said: "If you are running a nursery, for example, it's impossible to say whether there has been 50 children there every day or a dozen."

Intelligence officers for some time have suspected that some nurseries have fewer children than they say. "They might say they got their cash from Little Johnny's mum," said a police insider. "But, in fact, it is money from the drugs market."

Last month, Strathclyde Police and Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) officers raided a play centre and nursery in Motherwell under the Proceeds of Crime Act, as well as two houses in Lanarkshire linked to the nursery's boss, seizing financial and other documents.

Detectives are working with civilian watchdogs such as the Security Industry Authority and local councils to squeeze those known to have crime links out of legitimate enterprises. Scotland on Sunday understands they are also liaising with authorities that license and monitor nurseries.

Increasingly, police are sharing their intelligence on organised criminals with civilian authorities. This has prompted a counter-attack, with "clean skins" complaining that they are losing their livelihoods on the word of a police officer and that their human rights are being infringed.

Hamilton said: "We have to balance the rights of individuals who have not been convicted but who we know have been involved in organised crime against the rights of people who are inadvertently putting their hard-earned cash into enterprises that are actually fronts for crime."

He said most parents would not be able to tell if organised criminals had infiltrated their children's nursery. He said: "What we are talking about is organised criminals using a legitimate business to launder their money. That doesn't necessarily mean that their customers are going to get a bad service."

Graeme Pearson, a former head of the SCDEA who is now a professor of serious organised crime at Glasgow University, stressed that children attending such nurseries were not necessarily in danger: "These businesses are merely used as a shell through which organised crime churn their money.

"So will they hurt your daughter if you put her there? No. But they may well try to sell her drugs when she is a teenager."