An English court has ordered a businessman whom the authorities suspect of involvement with organised criminals to reveal the source of funds that he used to start and develop his £10 million property empire.

The man comes from the north of England. The High Court issued an unexplained wealth order on Friday in response to the National Crime Agency's investigation of eight properties that he bought in various parts of the country.

The NCA, which likes to think of itself as the UK's answer to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, has already persuaded the courts to issue a number of unexplained wealth orders but this is the first one to be based solely on allegations of this kind. Policemen believe that the businessman purchased properties with the help of some drug traffickers, armed robbers and suppliers of illegal firearms.

The High Court has also graned interim freezing orders to stop the man from sellling, transferring or dissipating his properties while the investigation goes on. He will now have to explain how he financed his acquisition of these properties.

Graeme Biggar, the director general of the National Economic Crime Centre, suggested that this is part of a campaign against criminal real estate: “We will use all the powers available to us to target those we believe are trying to launder money through the property market."

The NCA does not need a conviction to pursue anyone's assets. If it suspects that assets are a result of crime it can try to seize them (it always uses the word 'recover,' as the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 invented the fiction that the State has a civil grievance against the property-owning criminal and can therefore 'recover' his assets in the manner of recovering damages) through its Civil Recovery and Tax powers.

Stephen Ross, a fraud partner at the law firm of Withers, told Compliance Matters: "Unexplained wealth orders were beginning to look like a PEP hunt (targeting overseas politicians or their relatives), so it is no surprise that the NCA has struck a balance by pursuing someone who is not a PEP but has links to organised crime. The common theme of this third set of UWOs and freezing orders is of course valuable properties."

Many law enforcement agencies can seek UWOs by asking courts to grant them. The following conditions must be met:

• the respondent holds the asset concerned;
• the asset has a value in excess of £50,000;
• there must be reasonable grounds for suspecting that the known source of the respondent's lawfully obtained income would have been insufficient for the respondent to acquire the asset; and

The respondent must be:

• a non-European-Economic-Area politically-exposed person or PEP; or
• a person whom it is reasonable to suspect of having been involved in serious crime (in the UK or elsewhere), or who is connected to such a person. Serious crime covers a range of offences which include trafficking in people, drugs and firearms, together with a range of economic offences such as money laundering and bribery.

The power is investigatory. It is not of itself a power by which the authorities can sequester assets, but it does interact with such powers. Though UWOs only became available on 31 January last year, they need not apply solely to property acquired on or after that date; past acquisitions fall within their remit also.