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CRIME Godfather Christy Kinahan has been charged with passport fraud after a lengthy investigation by a Spanish court sparked by dozens of arrests in three countries, including Great Britain and Ireland.
The ‘Dapper Don’ is one of five men now facing charges stemming from Operation Pala, an unprecedented police offensive against the cartel that led to 31 associates being attacked.
Although Christy Kinahan (63) now faces charges for passport fraud, he has been told that he will not be tried for crimes of money laundering or belonging to an organized crime gang.
And Spanish state prosecutors have sensationally dropped their case against a number of other suspects, including his two sons Daniel (43) and Christopher Jr (40) after failing to build an airtight case against them. The eldest son, Daniel, has been named in the Superior Court as one of the main figures of the international drug and arms trafficking cartel.
He was also at the center of global controversy earlier this year when he was identified as the adviser who devised boxer Tyson Fury’s lucrative two-fight deal with Anthony Joshua.
The Kinahan brothers have had the threat of lengthy prison terms hanging over their heads for more than a decade in Spain after they were arrested by heavily armed police officers in their homes on the Costa del Sol as part of a five-country operation against the organized crime.
Alfredo Rubalcaba, Spain’s interior minister when the Kinahans were arrested in May 2010, linked suspected gang leaders to a string of killings when he congratulated police after the raids.
In its early stages, the judicial investigation focused on allegations of drug and arms trafficking.
It emerged in 2014 that a judge investigating Christy and a gang of alleged accomplices, including her two children, had decided to abandon their closed-door investigation into those crimes and focus solely on other accusations they faced, including money laundering and property. to a criminal gang. .
Money laundering
Today it was confirmed that the money laundering and criminal association facets of the investigation had been suspended, and only five of the original 31 detainees now face trial for misdemeanors that in most cases carry short prison sentences.
Christy Kihanan and two other men, Robert Edward Phillips and James Gregory Naughton, have been charged with passport fraud.
Jasvinder Singh Kamoo, who according to police investigators played a key role in money laundering in a report highlighted by the Spanish press in their initial coverage of the case after the arrests, has been charged with using false license plates on a Mercedes.
A fifth man, convicted armed robber and cartel lieutenant Ross Browning (36), has also been charged with illegal possession of a weapon.
Christy Kinahan, now also based in Dubai, has been warned that she could face a prison sentence of up to three years and a fine if convicted, although the minimum prison sentence under Spanish law is just six months.
The time he spent in pretrial detention after his arrest for Operation Pala, estimated to be around six months, will be taken into account in determining whether he will have to return to jail after any convictions.
It is not yet clear whether his defense attorneys will now seek a plea deal, as state prosecutors have yet to bring the indictment the investigating judge has asked them to bring.
A well-placed legal source said: “It is rare for Spanish courts to hand down jail sentences of more than a year for passport fraud where a plea deal resulting in a fine and possibly a suspended prison sentence for offenders is not reached. before the trial. “
The court decision to indict Christy Kinahan was made at the same time that her two children were told that the case against them was going to be dismissed and the written ruling with the details was sent to state prosecutors and defense attorneys for those investigated.
Alexandra Garcia, a university-educated Spanish citizen once described as Daniel Kinahan’s girlfriend who was investigated on suspicion of establishing the financial structure that was part of the alleged criminal empire of the Irish family, was also saved from trial.
The 24 men and women who were being formally investigated are now completely safe.
This is so unless some new compelling evidence comes to light in the future that allows them to be charged with criminal wrongdoing.
One of them is John Cunningham, who gained notoriety after planning the kidnapping of Jennifer Guinness in 1986. Her husband John was then the millionaire chairman of Guinness & Mahon Bank in Dublin. Cunningham was subsequently jailed for 17 years and his brother Michael, who died of a heart attack in January 2015, was sentenced to 14 years.
Judicial sources confirmed today that the current investigating judge behind Kinahan’s dramatic sentence, based in the Investigative Court Number Three of Estepona, had acted at the behest of state prosecutors who had requested the “provisional file” of the laundering complaints. of capital and criminal association against the suspects. .
The long-running judicial investigation triggered by the Operation Pala arrests has been bogged down for years by delays in obtaining responses to formal requests regarding the assets attributed to the “Kinahan cartel.”
Irish authorities are known to have been asked for information after the examining magistrate sought answers in Brazil, where police said that after the May 2010 arrests, the cartel’s property was 500 million euros.
Cyprus was also one of the countries in which the authorities were asked to provide information on the structure of the Kinahans.
It is said that it took Brazil five years to send its response and Cyprus returned its responses, but in Greek, causing an additional 18-month delay in translating responses, which the Spanish press described as “unprecedented.”
The written court ruling makes it very clear that there is no firm case against those investigated for money laundering, but there are “reasonable grounds” to suspect that they were part of a gang specialized in making sure that dirty money from drug and arms trafficking appears legitimate.
The Kinahan cartel had been involved in a deadly feud with the Hutch gang that has claimed up to 18 lives in Ireland and abroad.
In recent years, many of the cartel’s top figures have fled to Dubai and other parts of the Middle East, while many infantrymen and so-called managers “on the ground” have been sentenced to prison in connection with organized crime. .
Online editors
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