Diamonds, gold and crime displacement: Hatton Garden, and the evolution of organised crime in the UK

The 2015 Hatton Garden Heist was described as the ‘largest burglary in English legal history’. However, the global attention that this spectacular crime attracted to ‘The Garden’ tended to concentrate upon the value of the stolen goods and the vintage of the burglars. What has been ignored is how the burglary shone a spotlight into Hatton Garden itself, as an area with a unique ‘upperworld’ commercial profile and skills cluster that we identify as an incubator and facilitator for organised crime. The Garden is the UK’s foremost jewellery production and retail centre and this paper seeks to explore how Hatton Garden’s businesses integrated with a fluid criminal population to transition, through hosting lucrative (and bureaucratically complex) VAT gold frauds from 1980 to the early 1990s, to become a major base for sophisticated acquisitive criminal activities. Based on extensive interviews over a thirty year period, evidence from a personal research archive and public records, this paper details a cultural community with a unique criminal profile due to the particularities of its geographical location, ethnic composition, trading culture, skills base and international connections. The processes and structures that facilitate criminal markets are largely under-researched (Antonopoulos et al. 2015: 11), and this paper considers how elements of Hatton Garden’s ‘upperworld’ businesses integrated with project criminals, displaced by policing strategies, to effect this transition

The Costs of VAT: A Review of the Literature

This paper reviews the published literature on the definition and measurement of the administrative and compliance costs of taxation, with special reference to VAT (including evasion and fraud) in the European Union

The effects of the 2007 global economic crisis on firm relocation factors: SME movements from Greece to Bulgaria

This chapter examines the ways in which the 2007 global economic crisis has influenced firm relocation factors. Firm mobility constitutes a dynamic process, with its aspects changing in response to significant broader processes, such as globalisation. Specifically, the recent crisis has modified the socio-economic conditions under which firms operate. In order to examine the crisis-driven changes in firm mobility, this chapter employs a comparative analysis of the pre- and post-crisis relocation of Greek small and medium-sized companies to Bulgaria, which has recently increased. Greece is at the epicentre of academic and political debate in Europe, being the European Union member state mostly affected by the crisis. In the context of the changing economic and institutional conditions, it is demonstrated that the significance of the firm relocation factors, such as labour cost and level of demand, records considerable differences between the pre- and the post-crisis period