Money laundering is the other side of drug trafficking: it allows sums of cash, sometimes impressive, to return to the real economy. The fight against these practices is therefore essential, but complex.
They repeat wanting “hit the traffickers in the wallet”. The Ministers of the Interior and Justice, Bruno Retailleau and Gérald Darmanin, want to tackle the laundering of drug money to fight against drug trafficking. According to estimates, drug trafficking generates, in France, a turnover of between 3 and 6 billion euros per year.
The sums are most often counted in tens of millions of euros, but to begin, let's start from a point of deal that pays off.10 000 euros per day“, or seven times the minimum wage anyway, or a turnover of around 300,000 euros per month. The first step consists of recovering all this money, that is the role of “collectors”. Their mission: hand over these mountains of notes to money laundering specialists.
Lawyer Steeve Ruben defended a collector in the Paris region. He saw more than 17 million euros in small bills pass through his hands in barely a year and a half. “We tell him 'you go to such and such a place, we will give you an envelope, a suitcase, a bag, and you take it to point B to give it to another person', explains the lawyer. He doesn't know who gives him the money, everything is very compartmentalized. And I was going to say, he could even have been a courier to deliver Uber Eats, that wouldn't have changed much either, except that he was actually a little better paid than someone who does of Uber Eats.”
“The collector is a courier who needs to know as little as possible so that there are as few legal problems as possible when he is arrested. He's a fuse.”
Steve Ruben, lawyerat franceinfo
He then returned home with shopping bags full of notes, sometimes up to 500,000 euros, which he hid in a hot water tank before giving them to other intermediaries. Although he was sentenced to prison, the sponsor, based in Morocco, has never been identified.
500,000 euros in 10 or 20 notes is truly colossal. And traffickers cannot spend this money as they want. “As in France, you can only spend in cash, in a store, up to a maximum of 1,000 euros, obviously, it is not through everyday purchases that they can sell such sums, recalls Fabrice Gardon, the director of the Parisian judicial police. So the goal of these traffickers will be to launder money, that is to say, to reinject these enormous sums of cash via complex arrangements into the real economy. And therefore transform the money earned illegally into money that will have a legal appearance.”
Drug traffickers often turn to construction companies, which need cash for a simple reason. “There is a kind of agreement, with companies, therefore construction, but not only that, it can also be security or surveillance companies, which need cash to pay their workforce , doing hidden work”, explains Commissioner Cyril Mages, head of GIR 75, the Paris interministerial research group, specializing in the fight against money laundering.
This illegal workforce is therefore paid in cash by a construction company, with drug money, but the clients of this company know nothing about it, and pay for the work carried out with money. own money. And that's it. The construction company only has to transfer part of the money received to bank accounts of fictitious companies, paying bogus invoices, and behind these phantom companies, we find the traffickers, who have managed to launder their dirty money.
-In these money laundering cases, the sums we are talking about are often colossal. In December, two managers of construction companies were indicted, suspected of having laundered more than 90 million euros collected from deal points in the Paris region and Seine-Maritime. This network had also domiciled a fictitious company in Le Havre, in a premises where a ton of cocaine was seized in 2024.
These networks are also very difficult to dismantle. Investigators are faced with extremely complex financial arrangements and also know that it is not detention that slows down drug traffickers. “For big traffickers, prison can sometimes be perceived as a work accident, explains Fabrice Gardon, the head of the Parisian judicial police. Like a temporary inability to practice one's profession outside. So it’s essential to seize as many criminal assets as possible.”
Laundering channels for drug traffickers “are very varied”he continues. “Part of the money goes abroad, which will allow them to buy real estate in Dubai, for example. It can also take forms that are a little less known, but just as effective, such as buying back tickets lottery winners to people who have won, buying them back a little more than if they had gone to the tobacconist to cash in the winnings. It's a win-win, and the trafficker will be able to re-inject his illegal money. In the real economy by making people believe that he won the lottery, for example.”
Apartments in Dubai, villas, luxury cars, jewelry, bank accounts and even cryptocurrencies, this is a range of assets that can be seized. And this is often what hurts traffickers the most. “We carried out a search at the home of a trafficker, we found a lot of money in cash, it seemed to do nothing to himsays Commissioner Cyril Mages, head of GIR 75. On the other hand, when we asked his partner for the key to the vehicle, he did not want to give it to us. Their vehicle was seized, and that’s what bothered them the most.”
This represents 270 million euros in 2024 in Paris. Tackling money laundering must be the priority in the eyes of Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau. “We have an essential tool which is envied by a certain number of European countries, I would even describe it as a weapon of mass destruction. It is the presumption of money laundering, she explains. An offense that is easy to define: a profile is identified as having a lifestyle that does not correspond to their declared income, and in this case, we will go see them and tell them to explain to us where the money they receive comes from. made it possible to acquire such or such property, and it is up to the person concerned to justify himself.”
“We cannot now simply identify drug trafficking, we must also always combine within these investigations investigations into what happened to the loot, the criminal assets, who benefits from it and how to apprehend it .”
Laure Beccuau, Paris prosecutorat franceinfo
“A criminal enterprise is ultimately a business like any other: the objective is to make massive money, continues Laure Beccuau. And when this money is seized, everything that was the goal of this criminal enterprise is destroyed. Therefore, we must finally achieve that a well-known expression becomes reality: crime must not pay.” On condition, magistrates and investigators insist in one voice, to give many more resources to the fight against financial crime, so as not just to seize property, but also to dismantle the international networks which launder the money of the drug.
