By PAUL O’DONOGHUE, Senior Correspondent
ADRIAN Searle will step down from his role as director of the UK’s National Economic Crime Centre (NECC).
In a statement, he confirmed tomorrow will be his final day in the position.
“Tomorrow I sign off as director [the] NECC. Looking back on my time in the NECC… there is still loads to do to tackle economic crime,” he said.
“[But] I’m proud to say that the UK has taken a number of big strides. The NECC (with its partners) has played an important role in many of them.”
The NECC is a multi-agency centre established in 2018 to coordinate the UK’s anti-financial crime actions across different state agencies and the private sector. It is part of the National Crime Agency (NCA), which leads the UK’s fight against organized crime.
Mr Searle was appointed as director of the NECC in 2022. Previously, he served as group head of data and security risk at NatWest Group. Before that, he held a variety of prominent roles in the public sector. This included working as deputy director and head of incident management at the National Cyber Security Centre.
Adrian Searle NECC initiatives
In a post on LinkedIn, Mr Searle said the “soon to be published” NECC annual report will give more detail on the unit’s new measures to tackle financial crime.
He also said these include:
- Worked with Europol and Interpol to “develop new ways of cross border asset tracing”
- Developing “world leading” ways of data sharing with UK banks
- Operation Destabilise, the biggest money laundering operation in the NCA’s history
“These efforts have led to a significant rise in disruption of criminality, and prosecutions are now trending upwards after many years of decline,” Mr Searle said.
There’s lots more to do, but ever deepening partnership across government and industry, the very essence of the NECC, is the only way we will get on top of the evolving threat.
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