The swiftness with which the United Arab Emirates has moved in the wake of the US decision to impose sanctions on the Kinahan drugs gang is something to behold.
As this newspaper outlines in a report today on the Dubai-based business operations of the Irish crime family, the authorities in the emirates have been happy to accommodate the Kinahans for years, even after conducting risk assessments on brothers Daniel and Christopher junior, who are hardly low-profile individuals. The family has openly set up businesses in one of the low-regulation, tax-free zones which have played a key role in the economic growth of Dubai over recent decades. They have even had state employees seconded to their companies, in order to help them get up and running. In its desire to attract cash, Dubai is open for business, irrespective of the provenance of that money.
Christoper Kinahan senior has been profiting from Irish misery for decades. His first major conviction for dealing in heroin arose from a Garda raid in Marino, Dublin, in the mid-1980s. His career in the heroin trade began as the first generation of Irish addicts fell victim to what was then a relatively new scourge on these shores. Since then he has developed an international drugs empire, trading in products that have caused countless deaths, broken families and left a trail of addiction and violence in their wake. And for the past decade he has been creating an enabling corporate/criminal structure from his base in the United Arab Emirates.
The key role played by An Garda Síochána in the international policing effort to frustrate the Kinahan gang is to be commended, and the decision announced on April 12th that the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control was targeting the Kinahan crime group was a critcally important development. It surely prompted the decision of the United Arab Emirates to freeze Kinahan assets in that jurisdiction. Most likely it was Abu Dhabi, the most powerful of the seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates, that pressed for the change in attitude. It seems the oil-rich emirate is anxious, for security reasons, not to overly offend the United States, which acts as its security guarantor.
Last year Tánaiste Leo Varadkar led a trade mission to Dubai. It is a significant market, and one where many of the world's major corporations have a presence. Yet it is, as the Kinahan saga shows, a type of Wild West, where the worst features of the offshore world are being embraced. Walk through the centre of any of our major towns and cities and you encounter people whose lives have been made wretched by drug addiction. The same is true for cities and towns across Britain and continental Europe. The role played by Dubai in the misery that the Kinahans create is plain to see.