More than £100m suspected to have been imported to the UK from bribery and corruption overseas has been frozen following a court order obtained by the National Crime Agency.

Westminster magistrates’ court granted account freezing orders covering eight bank accounts holding in excess of £100m which is “suspected to have derived from bribery and corruption overseas”.

The NCA said the money is linked to an individual, who has already had £20m of his funds frozen following an earlier hearing in December.

The latest freezing order, granted by the court on Monday but only made public on Wednesday, is the largest granted since the Criminal Finances Act was introduced in 2017 to give police greater powers to crack down on people attempting to launder money through the UK.

If investigators find further evidence that the funds derive from, or are intended to fund, illegal activities, the NCA can seize the cash.

The NCA did not provide any further details about the suspect funds, but pointed towards recent cases in which the agency froze bank accounts of the son of the former prime minister of Moldova and the niece of Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad.

Ben Russell, deputy director of the NCA’s national economic crime centre, said: “In the last year, the NCA has used new powers such as unexplained wealth orders and account freezing orders to target suspected illicit assets, and we are already seeing some far-reaching impact of this activity.”

Earlier this year the NCA seized £25,000 of suspect cash from Anisseh Chawkat, al-Assad’s niece who had been studying design at the University of the Arts London even though several members of her family were subject to international sanctions.

She had been granted a student visa despite her mother, Bushra, the president’s sister, being subject to strict financial sanctions. Her father, Assef, had been the head of Syria’s military intelligence.

Chawkat was living in a £60,000-a-year rented flat in Knightsbridge. The NCA found that £151,000 had been paid into her Barclays account via 56 cash deposits made around the country in 2017 and 2018. The money is believed to have been transferred from members of the Assad regime via a Middle East middleman using a “smurfing” criminal network.

Smurfing involves the use of multiple individuals to make lots of cash deposits in the hope of avoiding money-laundering checks. The head of the network, sometimes referred to as “papa smurf”, sends “junior smurfs” to pay in less than £10,000 at a time. Investigators found that on one day money was paid into Chawkat’s account at Barclays branches in Birmingham, Leeds, north London and St Albans in Hertfordshire.

In another case, Vlad Luca Filat, the son of the former prime minister of Moldova, was ordered to hand over almost £500,000 following a corruption investigation by the NCA.

His father, Vladimir Filat, was sentenced to nine years in prison for his role in the “theft of the century”, whereby $1bn (£800m) was stolen from three Moldovan banks and laundered through Latvia’s financial system.

The theft, equivalent to 12.5% of Moldova’s entire GDP, prompted a huge government bailout of the three banks in an attempt to rescue the country’s financial system, causing the country’s currency to collapse.

An NCA investigation found that the son’s extravagant London lifestyle, which included a £1,000-per-day Chelsea penthouse and a £200,000 Bentley Bentayga, was funded by large deposits from overseas companies, including in the Cayman Islands and Turkey. Large cash sums were paid into three HSBC bank accounts, including £98,000 in one three-day period.

The 22-year-old business student at City University was seen in Facebook posts partying in St Tropez, sipping Dom Pérignon through a straw.

Filat was ordered to hand authorities £466,000 from the three HSBC accounts, which were frozen in May 2018.

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