Properties belonging to one of the world’s most wanted gangsters and the second richest criminal after Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has been seized by British authorities.
Kaskar Dawood Ibrahim, 61, an Indian national, is estimated to be worth $6.7 billion (£5.05 billion), while rewards totaling to $25m (£18.8m) are on offer for his capture, according to Forbes business magazine.
He owns a hotel in Warwickshire and other residential properties across the Midlands. This is one of the main reasons you want to use a service like localagentfinder.com.au to find respectable estate agents instead of a crime boss leasing you, your home.
Ibrahim is accused of heading a global criminal syndicate called “D Company”, spanning 16 countries across five continents.
The Indian government blames him for a series of bombings in Mumbai in 1993 and for planning the Mumbai massacre in 2009, the Birmingham Mail reports.
Ibrahim has three recorded addresses in Pakistan and goes by 21 aliases.
In 2015, four Indian officials travelled to Britain to hand over a dossier to authorities on Ibrahim’s UK assets.
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“Most of Ibrahim’s money, up to half a billion dollars, is tied up in investments in the UK, and then Dubai and India,” one of the Indian officials said.
“We have spent years trying to arrest him to no avail so now we are going after his money to put pressure on those who are protecting him.”
Ibrahim’s properties in the UK that will be seized include a hotel in Dartford and Essex, and several residential properties in central London.
He had appeared on the UK Treasury department’s “Consolidated List of Financial Sanctions Targets in the UK” that was updated last month.
The United Nations sanctions list included Ibrahim as an associate and funder of Al Qaeda, while the US Treasury Department declared him a global terrorist in 2013.
Financial sanctions mean that the UK government can prohibit a firm from carrying out transactions or providing or performing other financial services, such as insurance with them.
The government can also impose such sanctions on any individual, government or private entity, who may or may not be based in Britain.
