anybody find this as interesting as i do? i mean, we all see the movies: oceans 11, heist, the score, etc...this is real. they got away with £20million!!! http://news.ft.com/cms/s/29f2deac-53c0-11d9-b6e4-00000e2511c8.html Police were on Tuesday night hunting for a gang who stole more than £20m in what is thought to be the biggest bank raid in British history. The money was taken from the headquarters of Northern Bank close to Belfast City Hall on Monday evening. The gang is thought to have broken into the homes of two Northern Bank staff in the Greater Belfast and Downpatrick areas on Sunday night and is thought to have kidnapped their terrified families. The two employees were then understood to have been ordered to drive to work on Monday morning and follow their normal business routines otherwise their families would be in danger. On Monday evening the gang is thought to have forced some of the employees into handing over a “substantial sum of money” from the bank’s cash distribution centre between 6pm and 8.30pm. The centre contained millions of pounds which was on its way to be distributed to Northern Bank’s network of cash machines and 95 branches. It is traditionally one of the busiest shopping weeks in the run-up to Christmas and large amounts of cash would have come in from businesses in the city. It is believed that £20m may have been stolen from Northern Bank but the exact sum will not be known until the bank conducts an audit later on Wednesday. The gang made their getaway at around 8.30pm on Monday evening and the employees were freed. The police are thought to have been alerted late on Monday night and the investigation is being handled by the Organised Crime Branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Assistant chief constable Sam Kinkaid said on Tuesday: “Clearly this is a significant crime, two families have suffered great trauma as a result of the actions of these criminals. “There are people in the community here in Northern Ireland who will be aware of details of this crime and we ask them to contact the police.” Police said it was far too early to say which particular organisations are involved in this and whether the criminal gang had any connection to paramilitary groups. Police say they still have a number of crime scenes still open in Belfast, Downpatrick and at the bank. The raid comes just a week after Northern Bank and Dublin-based National Irish Bank was sold by NationalAustraliaBank to Copenhagan-based Danske for £967m. The deal will not be completed until the first quarter of 2005 so NAB is still offically the owner of Northern Bank and will have to bear the brunt of the losses. However in such cases banks usually have insurance policies in place to protect them. Tonny Anderson, chief financial officer of Danske, said Tuesday night: “This will not have any impact on the acquisition price but Danske Bank is not liable for the loss incurred by NAB.” Last week Danske said it would spend DKr1.5bn on restructuring the two Irish banks over two years. However some observers questioned Danske’s move into Ireland which one analyst called “a risky environment with an excessive rate of private-sector credit growth”. Investment bankers close to the deal yesterday said the incident at Northern Bank would not affect Danske Bank’s takeover. “The deal will go ahead and the price will not be reduced as a result of this development,” one banker said. Almost all mergers and acqusitions include a material adverse change clauses which allows the acquiror of a company to pull out of a deal if an external event, such as a terrorist attack, changes the value of a deal. However, because NAB will be insured to cover the cost of the theft, bankers said it was unlikely that a MAC clause would be relevant. “The amount of money involved is not material to NAB and does not allow Danske to change the terms of its offer, but it could be reputationally damaging,” one person familiar with the situation said. The raid has also raised questions about the security arrangements at Northern Bank. Other UK banks said it was highly unusual for any institution to have such a huge amount of cash in one location. Some banks like Barclays have outsourced their cash management to third parties. The bank raid will go down as one of the biggest heists in history. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the world’s biggest robbery took place in Beirut, Lebanon in 1976 at the start of the civil war. The haul was valued at up to $22m. At the end of the Second World War, as Germany was collapsing, robbers raided an estimated $2.5bn from Germany’s Reichsbank. And during the Iraq war last year, Saddam Hussein’s son, Qusay was alleged to have removed $620m in cash from the country’s Central Bank.
