flower companies, food companies. Yeah. Real estate. Yeah. Wow. Marble and ceramic trading company. Oh gosh, the list goes on and on and on, doesn't it? I mean, there's well over a dozen, nearly a couple of dozen companies here is there. I mean, this is one thing that I don't even think the NCA are aware of the extent of, you know, how many companies and how diverse it was. It really is.
So I'm a little bit nervous, I've never done this before. David Collins is speaking to a gold trader. They met a few days before. Can you just remind me, so how much gold am I able to buy? I think you said I could spend 100,000 dirham. Is that right?
The reason David says he's nervous is that he's undercover. He's continuing his investigation into how criminals like the Sunshine and Lollipops gang were able to carry millions of pounds worth of dirty money from the UK to Dubai and where the money went next. David's had a tip that the money can end up being turned into gold.
I see. The trader asked David if he's planning on taking the gold home to the UK. He explains that simply taking a solid bar of gold might cause problems with UK customs.
The trader explains it's easy to change the gold into jewelry. That way, no one in customs is going to look at it. Meaning, you can carry that gold home unchecked, then sell the gold and spend the money.
I don't find it when, like, 50-dollar hike for now. Did it, so I want to wait so it's a bit lower. They discuss gold prices, when to invest, until David thinks it's time to ask the question. Just between you and me, just between you and me, literally. Some of the money might be for Mike Drugs in the UK.
David says the money might be from drugs in the UK. The gold trader pauses for a second and says there is no issue on that one. I'm Fiona Hamilton and from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia, this is cocaine ink. Episode seven, The Dubai Gold Rush.
What kind of destination is to Dubai? It is, yes. I arrived in Dubai, late one Monday night. Just like Francesca, the Kashmiri where I spoke to in the last episode, I picked up my bags and strolled past customs.
Unlike Francesca, I didn't have millions of pounds stuffed into my suitcase to declare. I'll take this one. Once outside, I get a taxi to my hotel. A very futuristic car. A brand new Tesla.
We drive down the Sheikh Zayed Road, the main motorway that runs the length of the city. Sky scraper after skyscraper filled with offices, condos and hotels whizzed by. The city is the beating heart of the United Arab Emirates, one of the more business-friendly economies in the Middle East. Oh, that's the bridge, I'm up. Yes.
Wow. It looks like a wind sail, doesn't it? Seeing the Burj Alarap hotel piqued my interests. It's a seven star hotel. Yeah, if that's even a thing. My taxi driver says it's about £10,000 a night to stay. How much would it cost to have a wedding there? A lot.
and it's here where Daniel Kinahan, an Irish boxing promoter, accused of running a global drug cartel dubbed the cocaine cowboys, got married in 2017. The wedding was said to be a who's who of those in the global drug trade. The US Drug Enforcement Administration reportedly calculated that those on the guest list had shipped £23 billion worth of cocaine into your between them.
Do you take customers there? There's so many times. What jobs do you do though? Do you never tell you? Do you like business people? They never tell the secret how they earn money. They never tell the secret of how they earn money. My cabbie jokes.
This year it was revealed that Daniel Kennahan's wife owns a multi-million dollar villa in Dubai with gleaming white walls, elegant arch doorways and bright red roof tiles. I remember Pete Costa, the Dutch pineapple trader, linked to the torture chambers Fiona went to check out earlier in this series. He's said to have had a Dubai real estate portfolio worth millions.
It feels as if this modern city of luxurious skyscrapers and fancy shopping malls has become the place of choice for cartel bosses to kick back and relax away from their home countries in a different jurisdiction.
which is what's led me to the next stage in our investigation into the global cocaine business, looking at what happens to the profits. Once you've got your criminal cash to the buy, how do you then launder that money on a large scale? Well, you want to get it into the legitimate economy, and that makes it harder for law enforcement to trace it. And I've been tipped that a good way to do this is to invest it in gold.
Brilliant, thanks for that. So this is the centre of... The main centre is this big shop. The next day I leave the main tourist spot of Dubai and go to an area known as the Goldsuk. Asuke is Arabic for market and this one is full of gold traders at their stalls. So you can buy gold here. Yeah, yeah. Kegis. You can buy in the Kegis.
What like bars of it? Yeah. Wow, do people do that? Yeah. My taxi driver drops me off. Thank you so much. Bye now. The streets are full of small stalls, perfume shops, coffee stands. As well as this, there's plenty of gold shops.
Dubai was established in the 19th century as a small fishing village, but since then it is boomed. Oil money, tourism and construction have seen the money flooding in, but gold is also a big part of Dubai's economy.
This suit I've just arrived at has existed since the 1940s when traders and merchants from Iran and India first set up their shops. By the 1960s this area had become an important hub in a global gold trade and today people say there's over 10 tons of gold in this suit at any one time. But there's a dark side to this story. I've been told that cash is invested into gold by criminals.
So how simple would it be for a British criminal to come here and do that?
I enter part of the suit and now I'm officially undercover. I'm in an area which feels a bit like a department store lined with display counters and then gold tray the shops off to the side. I feel on edge. There's plenty of security guards. Everywhere I look, a glass shop windows dripping with gold jewellery hanging from packed displays. They are perfect. Exactly what I wanted.
I buy a cheap pair of knock-off sunglasses and a nice belt and I ask for a recommendation of a decent gold trader. Where would I go there? To buy investing gold. And directed to his shop. There's a group of men sitting about making deals underneath a TV screen showing the day's gold market prices.
On the wall, there's a portrait of the ruler of Dubai. A strike up a conversation with one of them. He's in his early 30s with thick black hair and an easy smile. We're going to call him Rashid. I won't use his real name.
Rashid reaches into a safe and shows me a gold bar. So that's a small gold bar.
It's exactly how you'd imagine it would look. A rectangular block, like the kind you see being piled into a Robbers van in a Hollywood house film. It's quite small, isn't it? Yeah. Machines polite, but it's noisy here, and not private enough for the kind of deal I want to make. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. Outside Rashid's store, I pass a couple more display counters.
I enter another gold traders. Much the same happens. The trader pulls a bar of gold from a safe and puts it on the counter. I leave but I'm a bit spooked. I wasn't sure he trusted me.
I might have just been imagining things, but I've done a lot of undercover work, and sometimes you get a feeling that the person doesn't quite buy your story. I felt more secure chatting with Rashid, so I head out of the gold suit, and a few days later, give Rashid a call.
We get pleasantries out the way and quickly move on to business. Staying undercover, my plan is to pretend I'm actually a cocaine gangster with a fortune in drug profits I need to launder. Rashid suggests how I could carry gold out of Dubai back into the UK, no questions asked. He says I can turn my potential gold purchase into a chain to wear through customs without paying any taxes.
and that it has British customers who have done it in the past. So the way you get round it is you put it as a chain round your neck. I want to find out how easy it would be for cocaine gangster to buy thousands of pounds worth of gold here and what if any checks there would be on the source of the money. So what is Rashid willing to accept?
Just name on the invoice, your passport number and sort of your passport on your phone. It's good enough for me. He says all he really needs is my name for the invoice and my passport number to put on the bill. A photo of my passport on my phone is fine. Yeah. You're still here leaving in Dubai and you travel only sometime and there's no problem.
But what about the source of my funds? If I was looking to launder my cocaine profits, I certainly wouldn't want anyone doing checks on where that money was from. So I want to see how much gold received might be willing to sell me without any paperwork or checks. The one thing is, do you need any checks to know where I got the money? It affects more than, like,
So two 3 kg it's okay with no checks. Yeah yeah okay because it's just the one thing is I'm not sure where the money's come from.
Just between you and me. Just between you and me, literally. I think some of the money might be from, like, crime, maybe drugs. Like, but... OK. No, it's just some of the money might be from, like, drugs in the UK. But I'm not sure. But if there's no checks, is that OK?
So, what just happened? I just confessed some of the money may come from drugs and crime. At first, Rashid says he can't hear me, but after repeating it, I'm confident he's understood my proposition.
He says if I bring him deer arms, the local currency and not British pounds, then there is no issue on that one. So, what does this actually mean?
But she has admitted that it will sell me 3 kilograms of gold in cash, knowing the source of that money could well be from drugs such as cocaine. That's £180,000 of criminal money, or £340,000 in Aussie dollars, nearly a quarter of a million of US. It's that simple.
If you as a cocaine boss running a cartel could get your money here to Dubai, you can launder nearly £200,000 with barely a proper passport check.
So that was fascinating. It was not kind of phased at all. Yeah, I mean, I am amazed actually by how easy it would be. You know, if I was a criminal, we could be moving kilos of gold very quickly in the next few weeks would be able to quite easily launder significant amounts of money through that gold trader.
Following that call to Rashid, I revealed that I was in fact a journalist. I asked him if he had anything to say about our phone conversation. He told me that his business would require evidence of the source of funds for gold purchases of around £10,000 and he had no knowledge of criminals buying gold in Dubai.
If you look at it as a business model, you'll always try and stay one step ahead of your competitor. And there are some pretty clever people involved in crime and they will always find another way to stay half a step ahead. And unfortunately, it's just a reality we often have to play catch up.
This is Ian Truby. Ian's the National Crime Agency Detective are spoke to in the last episode who helped put Abdullah Al-Felasi, the ring leader of the sunshine and lollipop gang behind bars. That's the group that smuggled over 100 million pounds out of the UK using Al-Felasi's business omnivest gold trading as a cover.
Once the money got to Dubai, Ian and his team believe it was laundered. But how exactly the gang did it was harder to work out.
Stirling's gone in, it's been changed into local currency and that currency's in turn been handed off to somebody else. We've got some evidence that there were some investment in gold, there was some investment in mining interests, but how much of that investment was from this particular cash? I can't comment, I just don't have that data.
Why gold? Gold is a really attractive commodity for criminals. It holds its value. You can source it from countries where there is no control, places like Africa, South America. There's an awful lot of illegal mining going on. Unfortunately, I don't think it's too difficult to get that gold into the legitimate supply chains, get it stuck in a vault, and that's it. That value is set there. It's an attractive commodity. It's an appreciating commodity.
So following the thread through, I mean, quite literally, coca plants are being turned into cocaine, transported by the cartels, you know, the commodities being sold in the UK. That is then being turned
into gold bars at the end of that process. From my interpretation of what I've seen on this, an element of that was happening. Dubai being a gold market now, as much as anything else, that gold market would also potentially be used by the criminals for laundering purposes or the value transfer to buy more cocaine or other illicit commodity.
To as Ian says, the National Crime Agency believes some of what Alfelasi did with the money from the Sunshine and Lollipops gang could have ended up in a Dubai gold suit. Now it was time to fully turn my attention to Alfelasi and his front company Omnivest Gold Trading. This was the company whose name was on letters that the cashmules showed customs officials when arriving at Dubai Airport.
The next station is Business Bay. I got hold of some documents that showed omnivest gold trading was located in an area of Dubai called Business Bay. An area packed with corporate high rises and there's ever swanky hotels. It's hot. You sometimes forget when you're in Dubai with all the aircon in the hotels, taxi and metro that this is a city in the desert.
I make my way to one specific office building. It's a 36-storey glass skyscraper called Prime Tower. It's in this building that Abdullah Al-Flass' company, Omnives Gold Trading, was registered.
The documents also reveal that omnivest gold was liquidated in November 2021, just days before Alfelasi was arrested. In layman's terms, that means that officially stopped trading and closed down. But I want to know if there's any trace of it left in this building, and if anyone remembers anything about it.
And to be on the safe side, I stay on the cover. Dubai in the UAE is not a culture of great media freedom. I don't want my cover to be blown. So I head inside pretending to be a British businessman, if anyone asks. I walk quickly past security, looking straight ahead and find the lifts.
I go up a few floors. From the documents, I'm pretty sure I've got the right one. I exit the lift and I'm in a corridor filled with pream walls, dark floor tiles and windowless wooden doors. Each one has a small sign to the side of the frame with the name of the business and an office number. Remember omnivast gold trading? I have seen this name. I think I have seen
Because we are not going that side, but I thought I have seen somewhere. Maybe he can guide you. One of the office workers walking through the halls remembers omnivest gold trading. He confers with a colleague or friend who then takes me to where he thinks it once was. You think that left from here? I will show you. Oh, thank you. Thank you. So I'm knocking on a door.
I've got no sign on the door whatsoever. I'm at answers. Hello guys. I'm looking for omnivest, gold, trading. My English number date. I'm trying to look in to see a bit more, but I'm asked to wait a moment. Hi, yes it is. I'm looking for omnivest, gold, trading.
This time, a woman with dark brown eyes answers the door wearing a hijab. She doesn't really give me the chance to see in, keeping the door slightly ajar.
I'm so close to getting a good look inside the office where Alfelas's money laundering operation was registered.
The woman politely tells me that omnivest gold trading isn't here. As she says, the current business is completely different, another activity, another company. Thank you so much. Thank you. Very grateful.
I feel deflated and desperate to know more about Abdullah Al-Felasi and what he was doing with the money that was being laundered out here in Dubai. Was Omnivest Gold physically once here behind that door? Were the people in the office or did Al-Felasi simply rent it so he had an address for his documents?
and that £100m plus of criminal money, much of it from the cocaine trade. Where did it go? It feels like it's dissolved into thin air. But it's time to leave Dubai and head back to UK. I've got a flight to catch and have exhausted all my leads. For now.
I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. Oh, oh, hi, David. How are you doing? I'm all right. Yeah, not bad. Back home in Manchester, a call Fiona, my colleague on this investigation.
Obviously, you know, we've been looking at this sunshine and lollipops cash mules gang, the National Crime Agency. I want to show her something because I have a fresh lead on Abdul Al-Felasi. A former colleague of ours, John Simpson, who used to be a crime correspondent at the Times, had gotten hold of some documents, which he was happy to share. I've sent you an email. Can you see the one? It's a PDF on the vest, gold trading, LLC. Yeah, I'm just opening that up.
The documents we're looking at give me much more information about Abdullah Al-Felasi, if you just go into the second PDF on that email. What one of them shows is all the companies that he was involved in, not just omnivest gold trading. He had stakes in a whole load of organisations, most of them listed as a director or general manager,
Gosh, there's a really long list, isn't there? It's huge. Flower companies, food companies. Yeah. Real estate. Yeah. Wow. A marble and ceramic trading company. Oh gosh, the list goes on and on and on, doesn't it? I mean, there's well over a dozen, nearly a couple of dozen companies here is there.
The scope is huge. I don't quite know what to make of it all. I mean, this is one thing that I don't even think the NCA aware of the extent of, you know, how many companies and how diverse it was. It really is. There's something else was going to show you as well, which I think you'll be interested in. Yeah. Just on that original email where the PDFs were, if you click on, you see the first link.
We're looking at a website that showed how fallasses reach went far beyond the UK and the UAE, because it doesn't stop in Dubai. They actually stretched to West Africa as well. Oh, yeah. I wasn't expecting that. That's really interesting. The website is for a company called Atlantic Holdings. The site is no longer available online, but this is an archive version of it.
Atlantic Holdings is based in Ghana. Oh, I see you're in Ghana now. So now we're in Ghana. And it was the parent company of omnivest gold trading, the company Alpha Lassie used to give cover to his cash mules. So what we can see here is that in July 16, 2019,
Omnivesk Gold Trading LLC was part of Atlanta Coldings. And on its website, it says Omnivesk Gold Trading LLC is our trading arm in Dubai, specializing in gold and rough diamond trading. We import raw gold, refined and sell to financial institutions within the UAE. Oh, wow. So what does this all mean?
Basically, from what this website is saying, our molasses company Omnivest Gold Trading was the Dubai arm of a business based in Ghana, West Africa. Right, get this for you. Omnivest is also a member of the UAE Kimberly process certification scheme. That is a global initiative.
for stemming the trade in conflict diamonds and promoting peace and security. And yet we know this same company that claims to have this certificate from this scheme is basically being used as a cover for organized crime. It's just extraordinary, isn't it? It's incredible. I think it's worth repeating this.
According to this website, the company Omnivest Gold Trading was allegedly part of a global initiative to promote peace and security around conflict diamonds. If true, the audacity of this does amaze me. Al Falassie was using Omnivest Gold as a front for organised crime. I've contacted the Kimberly Process certification scheme, asking if they had any comment on this, but they didn't respond.
We now know that Al-Felassie owned a whole host of businesses. We also know that omnivest gold was part of that parent company Atlantic Holdings. But who was Al-Felassie? We know he's an Emirati whose wife's family owned property in London and previous to this had no criminal record. But the website revealed new information about his past and also something more about his business.
If you click about us and scroll down, it says, our board members. And there's three of them on there. And one of them, he looks a lot younger than his police mugshot. And he's kind of wearing his Emirati white robes and headdress. Yeah. And it's, yeah. But that is Abdullah Al-Felasi.
What we're looking at is the three board members on the Atlantic Holdings website back in 2020. And there he is. Abdullah Al-Felasi is on the board. He's not just a director of omnivest gold trading, but sits on the board of the wider umbrella organization. Interestingly, he goes by the name Abdullah Bin Bayat. His full name is Abdullah Muhammad Ali Bin Bayat Al-Felasi.
It just hasn't actually said Alfalaci on there, but it's clearly him. It's clearly him. I like some of these details that he holds an MSC from the Dubai Police College. Yeah. And there it mentions omnivest directly. Today I'm going to take you on a trip around Dubai. Picture this. Yoga at the highest 360 infinity pool in the world. In recent years, Dubai's become a holiday destination.
The UAE is targeted tourists, with adverts like the ones I'm watching now. A city that redefines the luxury experience. We're talking about fine dining, we're taking views from the sky, Yakuza's in the raving sea, and of course, vintage rides that have you looking like a movie star. But as I'm finding out, behind this veneer of a place of fun, sun and affordable decadence, if you look for it, there's an uneasy tension.
In February this year, the global watchdog that looks at how countries deal with money laundering took the UAE off its grey list. That's the list of countries under increased monitoring for how they're dealing with things like money laundering and terrorist financing. While working on this series, I contacted the UAE authorities and asked them about omnivest gold and Abdullah al-Felasi.
Here's part of their response, read by one of the producers on this show. In February this year, the Financial Action Task Force, the global standard setter for measures to fight money laundering, praised the UAE's significant progress. The UAE is committed to continuing these efforts and actions more than ever today and over the longer term.
Back to Al-Felasi omnivest gold and Atlantic holdings. Now, we know that Abdullah Al-Felasi went to jail in 2022 for being the ringleader of the sunshine and lollipot's money laundering operation. We also know that the website for Atlantic holdings is no longer active and there is no sign of omnivest gold trading anymore.
But I came across another website with a very similar name. It's called Atlantic Trust Holding. Yeah, I'm just looking through this one now. So the interesting thing about this company, which is still active, is that it shares a lot of the same companies that Atlantic Holdings had. Wow.
I wanted to know more about this, and if this company has any connection to Alfelasi, who's currently in prison in the UK, so I contacted Atlantic Trust Holding and asked them. The chairman sent me a response, part of which is read here by a producer.
Atlantic Trust Holding has been in existence for close to 20 years now and had no dealings with Atlantic Holdings of Dubai. The website for Atlantic Holdings of Dubai was controlled by Alfelasi and his business partner. We had nothing to do with any of his activities. As a matter of fact, I have had no contact with Abdullah for some eight years now. We know nothing about his activities.
If anything at all, I would be someone to be jubilant because Abdullah used his influence to literally bully people. So that's it then. That trail ends there.
I still don't know exactly what Alfalassi did with the 110 million that was smuggled into Dubai using his signature and omnivaced gold as a cover. But I have managed to find out more about his various business interests and UAE than has ever been known before. This tangled web has shown me how international drugs gangs can launder their money.
Following the web of companies laid out in these documents shows me just how complex and multinational the modern day cocaine business has become.
We followed the raw material from the fields where it's grown to the ports and tunnels where it's exported out of South America to Europe at the massive distribution hub in Rotterdam to the UK and then Dubai. At every stage, a different criminal group has been involved in that part of the business.
And then from here, the money trail is suddenly split and leads into different countries and different businesses to gold to mining. The National Crime Agency has also told me that an alleged sunshine and lollipops gang member was found with gold bars in Tanzania.
I've also heard via a source that Alfelasi was in contact with people in the Netherlands and Hong Kong. While Alfelasi is now behind bars, we know the profits from the cocaine trade are at a record high with money laundering widespread. And I've got no doubt that there's more people like Alfelasi willing to do the same. Fiona and I finish off our chat.
I don't think I've ever seen an illustration quite so clear, step by step, of kind of from the UK coat trade through cash money through to Dubai. Then we have this purchase of gold in Tanzania and Africa. It's like a full circle, isn't it?
It just shows, doesn't it, how this is obviously a very fruitful area for the type of people that we're looking into to legitimise money and put it into other ventures far away from where the drug dealing is originally going on that you've been sort of exposing in this podcast? Yeah, absolutely. So is that the end of our trail? Well, no, not quite.
So this is it. This is the end of the line. Because my other colleague on this investigation, Stephen Drill, has arrived home after visiting the Koka Fields in Columbia and the narco tunnels in Mexico earlier in this series.
And while we thought the money trailer disappeared into this web of overseas investments and corporate records, Stephen was just about to pick that trail up, running right past his front door. Hi, my name's Stephen Drill, I'm a journalist. I just wanted to touch base, are you the owner of the property? I just wanted to wondering if the place has been seized by the police or what's happening with it now?
That's next time in the final episode of cocaine ink.
cocaine ink is a joint investigation from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp. Australia. The reporters are David Collins, Stephen Drill and me, Fiona Hamilton. Additional reporting on this episode from John Simpson at the news movement. The series is produced by Sam Chantarasak. The executive producers are Will Rowe and Dan Box.
Audio production and editing is by Jasper Leake with original music by Tom Virtual. Special thanks on this episode to our security team, Chris Kemp and Pete Emerson-Thomas. And if you want to get in touch with any questions or thoughts on the series, email co-caining at thetimes.co.uk.
