An article by Professor Heather Hamill has revealed how organised crime groups can exploit legal frameworks and commercial infrastructures to mask illegal activity and move counterfeit goods across international borders.
The paper focuses on Operation Singapore, a major investigation into a criminal network that trafficked falsified pharmaceuticals from China to the UK.
Drawing on law enforcement records, judicial transcripts, digital communications, and expert interviews, the study reconstructs the organisational structure of the network – which produced and then distributed falsified cancer, heart disease, and psychosis medications within the UK pharmaceutical supply chain between 2006-07.
Manufactured in China, and then routed through Hong Kong SAR, Singapore, Belgium and France, the falsified medicines were sold to licensed wholesalers who – unaware of their origin – distributed approximately 72,000 packs (or 2.1 million doses) to hospitals, clinics, and care homes.
Professor Hamill’s paper argues that the criminal organisation was able to flourish by exploiting regulatory gaps, particularly within EU trade systems.
By leveraging legal frameworks – such as parallel trade systems – they obscured their operations behind a veneer of legitimacy, thereby minimising detection and circumventing sanctions.
The study also shows that the network organised itself much like a legitimate business, with specialised roles shaped not by cultural traditions but by the practical demands of secrecy, coordination and risk. The manufacturing arm was hierarchical and security-focused, while the distribution side was more decentralised and transactional.
Although trust within organised crime is often sustained by kinship or shared ethnicity – as seen in mafia-type groups – Professor Hamill found that trust within this network was maintained through mutual dependence, appeals to loyalty, and careful control over who knew what.
This created a pragmatic and fragile form of cooperation – rather than reflecting a criminal “code”, trust was continually managed to reduce uncertainty and avoid detection. Violence and cultural cohesion, common features of traditional organised crime, played little role.
Secrecy was closely entwined with this mode of trust and embedded in the network through strategic compartmentalisation, limiting personnel involvement, and the use of deliberate misinformation.
Only a few key actors knew of sensitive knowledge such as the true nature of the products. Logistics staff, for example, were unaware of the actual contents of shipments, which were falsely declared to be dietary supplements.
Professor Hamill said:
This case vividly reveals the blurred boundary between legal and illegal markets. Operation Singapore did not operate in isolation from the formal, legal pharmaceutical market but was deeply entangled with it.
In this context, illegality appears not as a parallel system but as an alternative mode of participating in formal economic processes by adapting to ambiguity, exploiting gaps, and mimicking legitimacy.
Such illegal operations are often deeply entangled with the economic and regulatory systems of global capitalism.
