In the heart of Glasgow city centre, nestled between shops, bars, offices and hotels, sits the Mackintosh Tearooms, the last surviving tearoom designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and one of the city’s most treasured heritage sites.
But last week passersby noticed a shiny new shopfront next door to the 1903 category A-listed building: hot-pink capital letters on a white plastic sign, advertising a vape and mobile phone repair shop.
Six months on from a vape shop fire that destroyed the B-listed Union Corner, and almost a decade after the second of two blazes devastated the Mackintosh-designed Glasgow School of Art building in 2018, the decision to allow the shop to open in such a location has drawn ire and opposition from local people and campaigners.
Why would a vape shop be any more dangerous than any other type of shop?
Unless we’ve a gang war going on or something?
The Scottish fire and rescue service confirmed in the days after the Union Corner fire that it had started in a vape shop. A subsequent audit of other vape shops found a range of fire safety issues, including a lack of awareness about legislation and fire safety duties.
Nope, that’s it, that’s the justification. Well, other than that vape shops are dirty and nasty and prole and we don’t want to allow any of them. Which is the true reasoning here.
For once ‘the authorities’ have a point.
Vape shops are often money laundering operations. They have a thin veil of legitimacy, because people actually buy vapes rather than have their hair cut by some dodgy looking ‘Turk’. As such, they are ideal vehcles for Balkanese or North African criminal gangs.
There is no control on their wares, or the conditions in which they are kept and are all potential fire hazards.
Why do people think everything they don’t approve of is a money laundering operation? Money laundering is passing large amounts of illicit cash through a business so it can be regularised by paying tax & banked. Large amounts start at £100k+. Neither vape shops nor Turkish barbers fit the profile. They don’t have the turnover.to obscure the cash stream. If you want a good candidate, Wetherspoons. You could wash millions a month through that
They don’t. They think Albanian car washes and Turkish barbers and vape shops are, because they (mostly) are.
If you own a vape shop that does £300 legit business a day and you treble that with cash you wash through, that’s £1800 a week (assuming six day’s trading), or £93,600.
True, serious organised crime groups need to wash more than that…
So they open fifty vape shops.
No you couldn’t. Wetherspoons employs regular people, often students, as staff, as opposed to your cousin Mehmet, and area managers, and is a listed company with audited accounts, centralised tills and stock systems, audit and stock take visits, and a head office reconciling every site’s takings against what it sold.
Beer comes through the company’s own supply chain with duty already paid, so the stock is tracked from delivery to pint – the beer is metered through.
If all the pubs were getting cash injected it would be very obvious to their accountants, who are at least in theory keeping track of every bag of KP Nuts that comes in the door.
If one pub’s cash suddenly exceeded what its stock could explain, head office would notice.
If head office were in on it, PWC would need to be in on it, too, and probably HMRC.
Hang on…
Independent pubs, clubs and bars are a different story, which is why they have been and are used.
Any independent business which can explain cash purchases is a viable option.
Why don’t Chinese takeaways – to a man, in my experience – take card payments, I wonder?
Why don’t Chinese takeaways – to a man, in my experience – take card payments, I wonder?
Mostly because the Chinese are extremely tight in my experience and don’t want to pay even a small amount of interest as well as the usual reasons why small businesses like cash.
As recently as 2019 most German businesses I dealt with when travelling in my motorhome were cash only because of the cost of credit card transactions. Even now I make sure I carry a lot of cash if we’re going out for a meal or shopping in a small store.
You don’t think HMRC doesn’t know this? Their investigators have a very good idea what the affairs of a regular business should look like. Passing 900 a day though a business only legitimately trading 300 would stick out a mile. Why’s it so successful when similar shops aren’t? Why’s it handllng mostly cash when other shops have a different balance card/cash?. It’s the bank’s anti-laundering people will be alerting HMRC on that one.
I quoted Wetherspoons because you need businesses with that sort of turnover to launder. 93k a year is trivial. There’s billions require laundering.
My view on Turkish barbers is in addittion to providing haircuts they’re used to provide legitimacy for personal income. You can put a couple of people on the payroll, they pass a portion of their income through the shop which pays NI & PAYE & which is paid into their bank. They now have an earning stream & apparent legitimacy. They can prove income to rent a flat etc. Sure it’s very low level form of laundering but it’s not the purpose.
Vape shops? They’re usually on short leases. For the landlord, a low rent is better than a void. They cost almost nothing to set up & run. They’re really a feature of the decline of the high street. Possibly they put a couple of people on the books to legitimise their income like the Turkish barber.. Wouldn’t surprise me if the entire business wasn’t a legitimising income endeavour.* But that’s a different thing from laundering. Below Addolff mentions Aussie tobacco wars. Under the counter tobacco is a major criminal pursuit. And it’s competitive. So it’s not surprising if you get turf wars. It’s like the drug trade. There’s battles between rival gangs over markets.
*There’s a girl club up the road from me. It & a couple of others were owned by two Spanish brothers. They were thriving businesses in the noughties & into the teens. They built a hundred bedroom “hotel” attached to our one. But that’s all changed. The Spanish male doesn’t have the money in his pockets these days. The sort of tourists coming down here is different. The golfers were always a good prospect but golfers now are older & bring their wives. The brothers sold the clubs a while back. The one here was bought by a Romanian. It’s moribund. I went in their with a girl last year who used to work in the boom times. She was horrified. 20 listless girls standing around. About the same number of blokes Her eye for punters reckoned there wasn’t 50€ between the lot of them. Possibly it breaks even. You could certainly make more money out of a legitimate hotel & bar.. My suspicion is the Romanian is using it to legitimise his income from his other activities. Enough to justify the visible part of his lifestyle. It’s certainly isn’t the money laundry which lots of people don’t understand business think. It’s the wrong sort of business. Most of the cash leaves with the girls. All that’s there is the room rents & the bar take.
They’re usually on short leases.
I don’t think they bother with leases.
So, Muhammed has a lease, but he decides he wants out. But he doesn’t tell his landlord, he just hands the premises over to Mahmud. Whether or not the landlord finds out in the meantime, Mahmud’s use for the premises comes to an end, so he hands the premises over to Mohamod. Mohamod is there for a bit, and maybe the landlord finds out that his original covenant has buggered off and he’s dealing with Mohamod. Who’s paying rent. Until he is not, because he’s handed over the premises to Mohammed.
And so on and so on.
And just to make things much easier, all their surnames are Khan. And all the landlords are called Patel.
Spoons is too legit, but also, most people in Spoons are tapping their cards now.
It’s got to be tricky now, money laundering, because so little is cash. I bought a few things from an auction company and I could pay by card. I’ve been to craft markets and they’ve all got little card machines. Anyone who is majority cash sticks out like a sore thumb.
Are you the same Bloke in Spain who just claimed they wouldn’t spot it in… Wetherspoons?
Those were illustrative figures – call it £500 gen T/O and £500 fake if you prefer – but it happens. People get nicked for it.
In 2024 and 2025, the NCA/cops/HMRC and Trading Standards ran Op Machinize to target exactly these sorts of businesses, especially barbers, mini-marts and vape shops. Hundreds of raids, arrests, seizures of cash and illegal goods, and many business closures.
And anyway – how would they stick out?
Barbers and corner shops are expected to take lots of cash, so a high cash ratio doesn’t look odd the way it would at Wetherspoons. There’s also no stock to reconcile against haircuts.
Unless HMRC sends its, er, vast teams of, splurg, highly-trained crack investigators to stand outside these shops – shops run by ethnically protected people, by the way – how do they know how many people walked in for a short back and sides?
And there are thousands of these fucking places.
Have you been drinking? Has the sun got to you?
Banks file hundreds of thousands of suspicious activity reports a year.
The NCA team tasked with dealing with them numbers 200 and has 4.5 million reports on its system.
Only about 2,000 even end with transactions being stopped ie money being held.
Only a small fraction of those lead to an actual investigation.
A flag isn’t a prosecution, and phoenixing (closing and reopening under new directors) resets the trail.
Eh?? That is fucking money laundering!
Putting people on the books and passing their income through the shop so it arrives as taxed wages with a paper trail is textbook laundering.
By the way, no-one says this is how all money gets laundered. The really big money (billions) doesn’t go through barbers, it moves through property, trade-based laundering (fake invoices on imports and exports), shell companies, professional enablers, cash smuggled abroad, and crypto.
And in Peru, travel agents and evangelical churches.
You really are talking nonsense. 10 kilos of coke imported generates about £250k in money laundering requirements. That’s about a day’s supply for London. And you’re talking about a barbers being able to wash 3k a week. A figure I regard as wildly optimistic. Even a chain of 10 barbers wouldn’t put a dent in it. And how much up front money would it cost to set them up?
The bar I have an interest in pulls around 30€ a minute over the counter 6 hours a night 7 days a week. It’s not even a big bar.
Which is the better proposition for money laundering?
I’ve had this conversation with numerous people over the years. They all have their own particular targets & although barbers shops seems to be the current favourite.Like you, none of them have a clue about how the business actually works..
Nope. Vape shops and ‘Turkish’ barbers are notorious for being money-laundering operations because that is what they often are.
I have seen it suggested that the authorities are reluctant to investigate, because they welcome the tax revenue.
A barbers opened up near my small row of local shops, and another one opened up soon after less than 50 yards away. I have never seen a single customer in either one.
My local barber calls himself Ak-Barber and he’s always busy. He does unbelievers too, although there’s more hair involved. Cost in my currency including tip is about £5.
I’ve said this before, but I’d love to know who funds their fit-out costs.
I bet it’s the taxpayer.
You haven’t been here in a while, so it may surprise you to see just how many vape shops and Turkish barbers there are.
In fact, many high streets and parades are now: Turkish barber, fried chicken shop, charity shop, vape shop, tattoo parlour … rinse and repeat.
We do have exactly the same things here. Although I have a feeling the barbers may be Moroccan.
I have my hair cut by a dodgy-looking Turk because, although there are six barber shops in my area, they are all Turkish. And I’m not comfortable going into Marc Anthony’s with the girls.
Marc Anthony’s what?
With the girl’s what ?
What?
Apologies, spelt it wrong.
Looks like you live where I was brought up, Wombers.
That was just a convenient photo, although it’s not far from me as it happens.
OZ:
“National estimates: Around 260–300+ firebombings/arson attacks linked to the illicit tobacco and vape trade across Australia, with Victoria accounting for the large majority. One independent mapping project (tobaccowars.com.au) recorded 292 firebombings/arson among ~369 mapped attacks and cited 200+ Victorian store fires plus 300+ nationally.
Vape shops are just as safe as every other type of shop aren’t they. Aren’t they?
Doesn’t prove the vape shops are inherently less safe. Sure, they might be flogging poor quality vapes and the battery is more likely to spark something. An argument can be made.
But arson/firebombing is gang violence against competitors, legit or otherwise. Not an attribute of vape shops generally, but whatever proportion are directly involved in illegal trade, or driven out to make room for that trade. That trade driven largely by govt tobacco/nicotine policy, and policing ability.
UK gov are still working up to replicating Oz’ nutso policy, though they seem worse at policing criminality, so the net result is probably similar.
That they are or aren’t inherently unsafe wasn’t my point, it was that these types of activities often bring other sorts of activities which increases the risks to those around them.
Living across the road from a drug dealer doesn’t make it any more dangerous than living next door to anyone else, until said drug dealer had a dispute with other drug dealers who decided to make a point by turning up to his house* in a car, with a couple of shotguns in the boot.
I sat and watched all this from my bedroom window. Eventually, after everyone had disappeared, a police armed response unit turned up and we had a police helicopter flying overhead.
*Drug dealer wasn’t home, which was probably a good thing. For everyone.
Fair enough.
The quote is linked to the illicit tobacco and vape trade
Smuggling tobacco products & the supply chain gets them to the customer is a big money criminal activity. So it’s not surprising there’s a turf war over the outlets. That shops sell tobacco usually also sell vapes is likely the only connection between the two
The vape liquid is mildly inflammable, but the real fire risk is the lithium battery, of unknown origin, that powers each vape.
Yep, so it’s electric buses next, right?
No, thought not…
No the vape liquid is not inflammable. Vegetable glycerine & propyline glycol. They’re about as inflammable as milk. Both used in food processing.
The battery in a disposable vape is usually 1-2Ah at 3.7V, so ~20kJ. It’s unlikely to set fire to anything if it goes phut, but I suppose if you have a box of them …
The bansturbators in full swing. Oh, we’ve got you to stop smoking fags, but you still look like you’re smoking and you’re still enjoying yourselves!!! Right, now stage 2!
Who wouldn’t want a highly combustible front for money laundering run by swarthy forriners in their city, next to a historical site?
“A subsequent audit of other vape shops found a range of fire safety issues, including a lack of awareness about legislation and fire safety duties.”
I’m sure you would find the same in every business. The legislation is so (unnecessarily) complex that it’s essentially impossible to follow which has the only benefit that the authorities can always blame someone else for not following the law
I would assume the actual reason is the same as the reason many home insurance policies, at least in the US, forbid parking electric cars, scooters and bikes in the house or the garage. It’s those damn lithium batteries. Those in ecigs are likely Chinese crap. But even the batteries in reputable car brands sometimes go boom, hence the insurance policy bans.
Yes, funny how the Left suddenly shut up about their “Precautionary Principle” when it’s something they approve of rather than just something they want a feeble excuse to ban.
That would be a pity. I’d gladly see most listed buildings burned down, but I like Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Vape shops are full of cheap, poorly made, lithium batteries. The US Navy has forbidden them because of the fire hazard the present on ships
Real men smoke Players Navy Cut. 🙂
Capstan Full Strength Chris, or Disque Bleu for the froggies.
“the decision to allow the shop to open”
That decision was likely made in 1948 when the property was assigned “Class A1/A2/A3” (now called Class D).
“Well, other than that vape shops are dirty and nasty and prole and we don’t want to allow any of them. Which is the true reasoning here.”
And bloody good reasoning it is. Especially next to one of CRM’s masterworks.