(Picture: Getty Images)

London is the world’s leading city for drug trade money laundering, a world renowned crime expert has said.

Bestselling author Roberto Saviano has warned that UK banks and financial services are ignoring ‘know your customer rules’, which are designed to prevent criminals from laundering the profits of their illegal activities.

Mr Saviano currently lives in fear of his life after writing the book Gomorrah, which provided an insight into the Camorra crime syndicate in Naples, Italy.

The National Crime Agency estimated last month that ‘hundreds of billions of US dollars’ are currently being laundered through UK banks every year.




Describing the international drug trade, Mr Saviano told the Independent on Sunday that ‘Mexico is its heart and London is its head’.

Roberto Saviano is known for international bestseller Gomorrah (Picture: Justin Williams/ REX)

He also singled out the £1.2bn fine that HSBC received for money laundering for a Mexican drugs cartel in 2012, and said: ‘The biggest UK bank! Yet it has scarcely been written about. The British treat it as not their problem, because there aren’t corpses on the streets.

‘They think it’s all happening “over there somewhere”, so they needn’t worry about it. Sure, HSBC has been reported but there has been no debate. You need to fill the papers.

‘The intellectuals have said nothing. [David] Cameron has said nothing. It’s his country. How can he say nothing on such a piece of news?’

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Last week, Mr Saviano met Labour mayoral hopeful David Lammy, who said the UK needed to take his claims ‘very seriously’.

‘I am particularly concerned that London’s inflated property prices are fuelled by dirty money and I will do everything in my power as mayor to ensure that money laundering and tax evasion as rooted out by the authorities’, Mr Lammy said.