Securitas depot robbery, Tonbridge (2006)

During the night of February 21 to 22, 2006, a gang abducted the manager of the Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent, after pulling him over on the road with fake police officers, and took his wife and young son hostage. Under threat, he let the crew into the center, where the night staff were tied up. The robbers left with about 53 million pounds in banknotes, the largest cash robbery in British history. Several convictions followed in 2008, and a large share of the money was never found. The method, abducting a holder of keys or codes to have the site opened from the inside, which the London market calls tiger kidnapping, makes walls, airlocks and time delays useless. Cash-in-transit and cash-in-storage policies know it, so the underwriter looks hard at procedures: can a single manager open the center at night, is there a duress code that alerts someone outside, are funds split so that no forced opening hands over the whole stock? Accumulation is the other angle. A processing center concentrates the cash of an entire region, and the value on site on a given night can far exceed the declared average, which the policy handles through a per-location limit or a periodic declaration of values. On the claims side, two questions come first: does the policy cover an opening obtained through threats made away from the premises, and does an employee acting under duress count as an accomplice? Wordings generally treat duress separately from fraud, but the internal investigation always comes before payment. Not to be confused with kidnap and ransom cover, which pays the ransom and crisis costs for a kidnapped person, nor with employee fraud, where the employee acts of his own free will.