Laundering: The gang behind last month's Northern Bank raid may still be able to launder a proportion of their haul, despite the proposed recall of all Northern bank notes.
However, security sources and money laundering experts have indicated that the market for laundering cash is so limited for Northern Irish sterling, it will be almost impossible for the gang to launder the bulk of the stolen notes.
The recall of all the Northern notes would seriously limit the potential to launder a significant proportion of the £26.5 million sterling stolen in December, according to Mr Jeffrey Robinson, a money laundering expert and author of a book on international laundering, The Laundrymen.
He said that, from the outset, the £12.5 million of numbered Northern Bank notes were "toilet paper". "It was in £10 and £20 notes. That's two and a half tonnes in weight. You have a huge problem there, even to hide it. You can't get rid of it abroad, because no bank in the world would touch it," he said.
He said the recall would make the as yet unidentified amount of unnumbered Northern Bank notes useless when the changeover commences, as anybody attempting to exchange large amounts of Northern Bank cash would come under suspicion.
Previous figures supplied by the PSNI has suggested that a further £4 million was in unmarked sterling notes, which Mr Robinson said could be laundered. "That's just £200,000 for each member of the gang, which you can hide."
However he believed that this maximum payment, may lead to the downfall of the gang, as it is only a fraction of what members may have expected, and therefore could lead to friction between them.
According to senior Garda officers the recall of the Northern Bank notes has effectively stymied any hope of a significant gain for the robbers.
"Usually, with a large haul, you sit on it until things have quietened down, and then you get rid of it," said one experienced organised crime detective. "The recall means they can't do that. They would have had to get rid of it by now, and they'd have had a job to do it.
"There's no way they could do it without being noticed. The money laundering legislation works fairly well. All the financial institutions know they have to report any suspect transactions. Northern Ireland's just too small to do it."
English security experts also questioned whether the gang would have been able to have laundered the cash, even if the recall had not taken place.
"I simply do not understand why they did it," said Mr Dick Kirby, a retired detective from the London Metropolitan Flying Squad, which specialises in investigating bank robberies.
"It's clear they had very good intelligence, so they would have had to have known that the vast majority of it would be in Northern Ireland currency. When I was a detective, I would usually put myself in the minds of the criminals, and in this case I thought, if I was going to pull off a massive raid like that, I would have targeted Chase Manhattan Bank for dollars."
However, one expert questioned whether the recall would be as successful as the PSNI thought.
Mr Peter Lilley, an English security consultant and author of another money laundering book, Dirty Dealing, said that if the IRA was involved, they "would have anticipated" the amount of Northern currency and planned accordingly.
"One would assume of the Provisional IRA that they have the contacts and mechanisms in place to at least attempt to launder large amounts of money, and in view of the events, as quickly as possible."