FINANCIAL NOTES - THE BUYING POWER OF ILLEGAL NARCOTICS

IMAGINE A multi-national company so big and powerful that its annual
turnover is equal in size to China's gross national product, making
that company 11th in the world rankings ahead of the Netherlands,
Australia, Russia and India. A company whose gross turnover for just
one financial year is sufficient to buy at current market value the
world's three largest public companies, General Electric, Royal Dutch
Shell and Microsoft. A company that if it dipped into its petty cash
could in the same year buy Coca-Cola. A company where just 10 days
turnover is in excess of the combined assets of the world's top 50
banks.

Its current annual turn-over is $500bn. The cash mountain is derived
from just three assets. People, paper and product - illegal drugs.

The cartel of cartels - the drugs alliance that sits at the top of the
infrastructure of the illegal narcotic world has an inexhaustible
quantity of these three assets. They are endlessly available. The
product, whether cocaine, opium, heroin, marijuana or the range of
chemical drugs such as amphetamine, PCP, LSD, generates the paper, the
dollars, the euro, sterling and countless other currencies which feed
the machine - the people.

If the profits for the cartels are vast, so also are the quantities
that they pump into the market. If the annual supply of cocaine were
to be packed in 1.5kg bags - the size of a regular bag of flour - the
amount supplied to the United States each year would, if stood on top
of each other, be four times as high as Mount Everest. If the amount
supplied to the entire world were similarly stacked it would be 13
times as high as Everest.

The world that this power grouping at the top of the illegal narcotics
pyramid inhabits is a world where money by the ton is available for
whatever is needed. In Latin America the cartels buy presidents as
easily as they buy a customs official or a DEA (Drugs Enforcement
Agency) official. Or the technical know-how to create and operate "El
Gordo".

El Gordo, "the fat one", is the pet name for a computer regarded by
its creator as "out of this world". An apt description for a system
based on Nasa's computer network. No one makes a phone call, sends a
fax, uses a computer, in many a Latin American city, without "sharing"
the line with the fat one.

The fat one is linked to its brothers in Medellin,
Cali, Bogota, Caracas, Lima and La Paz. It has
immediate access to every scrap of information
contained on police and Intelligence computers in
Colombia and Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia: the
criminal records, identification data, status of all
criminal investigations.

A string of hotels, major business centres and industrial companies in
Italy. A huge office block on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, another
in Rue de Ponthieu and a third in Rue de Berry in Paris. Prestige real
estate holdings in Montreal. A marina in Vancouver and large farm
holdings near Edmonton in Canada. Farm holdings are something that the
drug barons are particularly fond of. They own huge tracts of land in
virtually

every country in South America.

In the United States drugs money has probably been used to buy five
huge apartment blocks in Washington, and in New York a residential
area of 250 acres situated at Oyster Bay. All of these assets are
owned by offshore nominees.

In Great Britain profits from the sale of narcotics are rumoured to
have been laundered to acquire substantial holdings in Canary Wharf,
Belgravia, Mayfair, Hampstead and the City, a piece of the Channel
Tunnel, a piece of the Japanese high speed rail network, a piece of
Sydney's business centre, two marinas in Auckland . . .

The above list of holdings represents less than 20 per cent of the
legal assets that have been acquired with dirty money.

David Yallop is the author of 'Unholy Alliance' (Bantam, 16 March,
UKP9.99)