The woman chasing the ill gotten gains of Scotland's criminals

And now their team found the place to be “vacated” and “extensively damaged”, as sources put it in their heavily latinised legal argot.

This was not just any old house bought with a dodgy mortgage and subject to recovery under proceeds of crime legislation.

It was understood to be home to “the family of a head of an organised crime group” which “had been purchased in the name of a ‘clean skin’”.

The official owner decided they did not want to contest the court order, “disclaiming interest” in the property. The house was sold, for enough to pay back the mortgage lender and take a small cut for the state.

This little episode took place more than three years ago. It is the result of bread-and-butter work by one of the lowest profile teams in Scottish law enforcement, the Civil Recovery Unit, or CRU. And it sums up their job: they harry and frustrate what most of us call gangsters by chasing dirty money and assets.

Anne-Louise House heads the CRU. The lawyer, who rarely talks publicly, spoke to The Herald to mark 20 years since the unit was created after the landmark 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act came into force.

And, as she did so, she kept repeating a single word, one that perhaps kind of summed up by the seizure of the Falkirk house: “disrupt”.

This word – along with the more self-explanatory “divert”, “deter” and “detect” – is one of the Four Ds, or strands, of Scotland’s strategy to combat organised crime.

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“Our mission is to disrupt organised crime groups and help make Scotland a hostile environment for criminals,” she said.

Her “D” is possibly the hardest of the four to understand. But essentially Ms House and her team are among those aiming to put a stick in the spokes of organised crime.

They are trying to choke off the supply of money, crucially using civil rather than criminal proceedings.

But they are also attempting to make it harder for criminals and their enablers and money-launderers to function at all – even if the people they go after have not been convicted in a criminal court.

Using an abbreviation for organised crime group – OCG – Ms House explained: “The powers of the POCA act give us an opportunity to disrupt operations of OCGs through the investigation and removal of assets.

“That includes assets which are strategically placed in names of others, which is something that we quite often come across, when somebody holding property is used as a front for an OCG.

“In our view, removing assets helps destabilise OCGs by removing fund flows and puts pressure on OCGs not currently subject to proactive criminal investigations.”

This is the key point. CRU operates under civil law, where the burden of proof is lower, as the “balance of probabilities”, not “beyond reasonable doubt”.

That means it can get to criminals that police and prosecutors might not be able to touch. The unit can act against people who have not been found guilty in a criminal court.

Some of the targets of CRU actions may not even know that they are holding criminal proceeds. Some may be family members or friends who are not directly connected to offending. There are patsies. Or they are “clean skins”. Fairly often, such individuals end up settling out of court, avoiding the publicity and cost of lengthy proceedings.

The unit is trying to take away people’s unexplained wealth, not their liberty.

For some career criminals, spells in jail are just part of the cost of doing business. For them, losing their fortunes, their homes and their cars can be more painful than a stint behind bars.

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For others, trying to explain to CRU where their money comes from might be their only brush with law enforcement.

This makes this team of two dozen or so lawyers, investigators and accountants disproportionately important to the fight against Scotland’s biggest crooks. So much so only one of them is routinely named – Ms House. And her picture is never published.

Police and prosecutors sometimes refer targets of investigation to the CRU after they fail to get enough evidence for a criminal prosecution. So is suing for proceeds of crime through the civil courts just a last resort, one for the “untouchables” who normal prosecutions cannot reach? No. Sometimes it is the opening gambit, not the closing one.

Indeed, Ms House stressed the importance of “front-loading” investigations. CRU solicitors, with help from investigators and accountants, aim to get their cases firmed up early in a legal process, encouraging early settlements out of court.

“While we understand there’s a good reason for criminal proceedings to be considered in the first instance, we think there are cases where the best strategy for disrupting particular groups may be civil recovery,” explained Ms House before adding: “Depending on the circumstances.”

“One of our key messages is not to think of civil recovery as at the end of the process, but at each stage to look at whether it would be an appropriate route to tackle a particular OCG.

“There doesn’t have to be a criminal conviction. So civil recovery proceedings can be particularly effective, perhaps, for those who have managed to distance themselves from direct involvement in criminality. Those are often the people that we end up looking at.”

The unit is clearly part of law enforcement. Ms House and her team work, physically, at the Crown Office’s Edinburgh HQ. But they are not prosecutors. They work alongside fiscals, not under them, and at a careful distance. The Lord Advocate, currently Dorothy Bain KC, is ultimately responsible for the CRU. But as a minister, not as Scotland’s chief prosecutor. That nuance matters.

The CRU gathers evidence in a very different way to police. It can secure disclosure orders which force the targets of investigations to reveal evidence, for example, bank accounts. That means it has to have its own separate computer network. Yet CRU needs other agencies, including the crown, to flag up potential targets of civil recovery.

“We are reliant on cases coming to us,” said Ms House. “So it’s really important for us to work with partner agencies, to encourage them to consider referring cases to us at each stage of investigation really.

“One key point is we work independently of the [Crown Office] COPFS so, whilst we sit with them, which makes sense because we get a lot of referrals from them ... . But we go to Scottish ministers if we require direction.”

The unit is not just dealing with police or the crown. It has been reaching out to other perhaps less high profile law enforcement agencies and regulators. Ms House cites trading standards.

This kind of multi-agency thinking is as big a plank of Scottish counter-organised crime thinking as the four Ds. Ms House says such collaboration has “probably improved over time”.

The CRU, moreover, also works with UK bodies, not least HMRC. It flags up many of its cases to tax investigators.

The unit was set up in February 2003, shortly after the first big POCA act came in to force. A lot has changed since the unit was set up in February 2003, shortly after the first big POCA act came in to force. And not just the more collaborative way of working – often, of course, with what is now a single police service. The CRU has also been beefed up. The unit – often described as “secretive” in the media, including in this paper – does not give much away about its capacity. But its expertise has grown over the two decades. So, of course, has that of those it targets.

There has also been new legislation, new powers, such as Unexplained Wealth Orders, a rarely used investigatory tool. And further reforms are working their way through Westminster.

Challenges remain. It can be hard to get information from foreign jurisdictions, for example. But CRU thinks this too is improving.So how do you measure the success of disruption? Not easily.

The CRU’s main public outcomes are reported in pounds, the allegedly dirty millions it secures, almost all of which goes to a special pot for good causes, the CashBack for Communities scheme.

Next month the unit will confirm its latest annual haul, for 2022-23. It is expected to take the running total secured to comfortably above £70 million.

As of last year the tally topped £68m. It has also helped secure £965,713 for victims able to show that money or assets seized belonged to them.

But denying dirty money to criminals remains as important as seizing it for the state. And this includes audacious and innovative civil actions. The CRU, for example, was able to get a life assurance policy cancelled because it could show premiums were paid with tainted money. Crime does not always pay, even for the dead.