The North's Assets Recovery Agency says it has in "its sights" 30 drug dealers, smugglers, loan sharks and other criminals, many of them from republican or loyalist backgrounds.
It hopes to seize or freeze up to £9 million (€13.3 million) in assets from Northern Ireland criminals in the coming year. However, it acknowledged disappointment and frustration at the amount of illegal money and goods it actually seized last year.
After four years in operation, the Assets Recovery Agency on a UK-wide basis finally became self-financing last year, costing £15.5 million to run but seizing £15.9 million in assets.
In Britain and Northern Ireland the agency disrupted or froze £73.6 million in criminal assets, which includes the £15.9 million seized, according to its annual report published yesterday.
In Northern Ireland £14.5 million was taken from alleged criminals but of this figure a "disappointing" £443,000 was actually seized. The remainder was frozen as the agency goes through the often tortuous legal processes of "banking" this money.
Since the agency, which is largely modelled on the Criminal Assets Bureau in the South, was established in 2003 its Northern Ireland operation has frozen more than £39 million in illegal assets. Of that figure it "banked" or seized £1.5 million of assets.
The agency had hoped to recover between £4.5 million and £7.5 million in the North last year. Interim UK director Alan McQuillan conceded these figures were disappointing but said they would improve as cases before the courts to seize millions of pounds in assets were concluded.
He said the agency was examining its internal systems of operation to improve seizure rates. Agency sources said it was more difficult to process cases through the courts in Northern Ireland than in Britain. Seizure cases where money was frozen often take up to four years to conclude.
"We have one trial case for the seizure of assets that concluded in May last year but the judge, a year later, has yet to rule on what should happen to the assets."
A second factor was that alleged criminals targeted were engaging in delaying tactics to hold on to their assets.
"In some cases people are sacking their legal counsel three and four times so that cases are constantly adjourned and delayed," he explained. "We are often standing in the legal foothills, fighting trench warfare to recover assets," he added.
Agency sources said that notwithstanding the IRA's move away from criminality it was still working to the principle that half of the assets disrupted came from former or serving republican and loyalist paramilitaries. The sources emphasised that they weren't alleging the IRA as an organisation was still engaged in crime but that individual republicans, as well as loyalists, remained involved in various forms of serious and lucrative illegal activity.
"Groups may be getting out of crime but there are individuals who are not," said one source.
"Just because certain paramilitary groups may have gone away it doesn't mean all their members have. They have the skills, contacts, knowledge and ability to remain involved in crime and some have taken that option," he said.
Assets seized or frozen last year included cars, houses, jewellery, hard cash, bank accounts and overseas assets. The types of activity targeted included drug dealing, fuel, cigarettes, alcohol and other forms of smuggling, counterfeiting, mortgage fraud, loan sharking and illegal dumping.
Dumping was a relatively recent but very profitable enterprise, explained one agency source. "Take the dumping of clinical waste. That can cost between £3,000 and £5,000 per ton to legally dump. You have people paying farmers a minuscule portion of that figure to dump thousands of tons of the stuff on their fields. Think of the huge profit margins there, not to mention the environmental and health hazards," he said.
