Laundered cash from Britain’s largest gold bullion robbery was hidden with the help of an audacious plan hatched with advice from Mossack Fonseca’s co-founder.
More than 30 years after the infamous raid on the Brink’s-Mat depot near Heathrow, new information shows how the robbers’ main money launderer tried to cling on to
some of the proceeds with the help of the Panamanian law firm at the centre of the largest ever leak of offshore data.
The 1983 dawn heist had involved masked gunmen terrifying security staff into giving up vault combination numbers by dousing their genitals in petrol and threatening to set them alight. The gang drove off with 3.5 tonnes of gold, worth £26m (almost £80m today), making it the highest value robbery in British history at the time.
More than two-thirds of the gold has never been recovered. Meanwhile,
at least half a dozen killings – including the 1985 stabbing of an undercover police officer – have been connected to the band of
criminals who battled among themselves for decades for control of the bullion.
Thirty years later leaked papers from Mossack Fonseca’s archives have revealed surprising details of how the money launderers sought to outwit police on their trail.
As early as 1986, Mossack had been tipped off that he
was unwittingly acting as a director of a company that might be owned by those
moving money for criminals involved in the heist. In an internal memo never intended to leave its Panamanian files, Mossack refers to the “
famoso robo del depósito de Matt Brink en Londres”, and records how a well-meaning informant had telephoned to suggest Mossack should resign immediately from a front company the gangsters secretly controlled.
“The company itself has not behaved illegally,” Mossack noted, copying the memo to his partner, Ramón Fonseca. “But it could be that the c
ompany invested money through bank accounts and properties that was illegitimately sourced.” Despite the tipoff, Mossack did not resign immediately. Moreover, t
he lawyer became a trusted adviser to a Panamanian company controlled by Parry,
the gang’s offshore launderer-in-chief, who went into hiding in Spain.
First records in the Mossack Fonseca file show inquiries being made by Centre Services, an offshore specialist firm in Jersey, about potential names for Panamanian companies in 1984,
12 months after the Heathrow raid. No details were given of the person on whose behalf the inquiries were being made.
A fax to Jersey regretted to say one of the preferred names, “Midas Inc” – seemingly a joke – was not available. The next day, the more discreet Feberion Inc was chosen. Under Parry’s direction, but unknown to Mossack Fonseca,
millions of pounds were salted in Feberion and other
front companies and bank accounts in secrecy jurisdictions such as Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Jersey and the Isle of Man. He is said to have laundered £10.7m, for which he would eventually be sentenced to 10 years behind bars.
With funds washing through his offshore front companies, Parry believed the laundering process complete.
The cleansed money could be
returned to Britain to finance legitimate property deals, unidentifiable as the proceeds of crime. Using offshore firms, P
arry arranged deals including the purchase of land in London’s fast-regenerating Docklands and some buildings formerly part of Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
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Through one Jersey company he bought Kathleen Meacock, girlfriend of robbery ringleader McAvoy, a Kent farmhouse, where she settled with her two rottweilers, Brinks and Mat. Then, a short drive from Meacock’s home, Parry used Feberion to buy a £400,000 home for himself and his family. Gold-plated taps were installed in the bathrooms and more than £60,000 was spent on curtains for Crockham House, an isolated mock-Tudor mansion set in substantial grounds in the backroads of Kent, near Chartwell, Sir Winston Churchill’s former country residence.
By late 1986, the authorities were catching up with Parry. In cooperation with the Jersey authorities, the Metropolitan police froze papers held in the offices of Centre Services and took control of the two Feberion bearer shares. Bosses at the tiny Jersey company panicked and rang Panama. This was the tip-off call that is thought to have first linked Feberion to the Heathrow robbery in Mossack’s mind.
A few weeks later, police who called at Crockham House found Parry had fled. His prospects looked desperate, but he was not about to give up. Shortly afterwards, according to the Panamanian law firm’s files, an audacious plan to seize back control of Feberion from the Met was hatched.
Centre Services were no longer of use as company administrators. Parry appointed a firm from Panama to replace them. These new administrators would not be as easily spooked by the attentions of UK police. Mossack Fonseca, meanwhile, took the role of legal advisers.
In 1990, after more than three years on the run, Parry was found by police outside Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol and brought back to Britain. He was formally arrested as he stepped off the plane at Heathrow, not far from the scene of the heist seven years earlier.
At his trial, the jury were told Parry had helped make the gold seemingly “vanish into thin air”. The laundering plot, prosecutors said, had been carried out with nerve and daring, and was “little short of brilliant”, inspiring a “grudging admiration”.
The evidence against him, however, was overwhelming. Sentencing Parry to 10 years in jail, the judge said: “There has never been a more serious case of handling.” In Westminster, the case had helped galvanise policy-makers into drafting a new criminal offence of money laundering.
