A self-styled clothes tycoon who offered counterfeit socks and pants whereas working an intensive fraud ring may have all his UK belongings seized after the Crown Prosecution Service received a court docket order to confiscate as much as £90m price of property and luxurious vehicles.
Arif Patel, 57, from Preston, Lancashire, who has been on the run since 2011, may have properties and enterprise premises he owned taken from him after a confiscation order granted by a choose at Chester crown court docket on Thursday.
His Ferrari 575 Superamerica will probably be offered at public sale, as will property in Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Patel masterminded a gang that was convicted in 2023 of one of many UK’s greatest VAT tax frauds in HMRC’s historical past.
In a sequence of trades referred to as carousel fraud, he moved items between completely different firms, creating false export and import information that he used to say again massive sums from the tax authorities.
Quickly after the fraud was uncovered, Patel absconded to Dubai, the place it’s understood he has been ever since.
Carousel fraud has netted criminals a whole lot of thousands and thousands of kilos in VAT fraud over latest a long time and led to issues about HMRC’s skill to guard from abuse the primary tax on the sale of products and companies.
There are additionally more likely to be issues concerning the size of time it has taken to safe the convictions, which resulted in a bunch of VAT fraudsters being tried of their absence, and the confiscation order, which has taken an extra two years.
Through the trial, investigators confirmed how Patel’s operation stole thousands and thousands of kilos by means of VAT compensation claims on false exports of textiles and cellphones.
Patel’s gang additionally imported and offered counterfeit garments that might have been price a minimum of £50m had they been real.
He has now been ordered to pay again £90.5m with the sale of his properties in Preston, London and abroad.
Patel and his co-accused, Mohamed Jaffar Ali, 61, of Dubai, have been discovered responsible of their absence of fraud and cash laundering offences after a 14-week trial in 2023.
They have been sentenced of their absence to a complete of 31 years in jail. The UK does have a proper extradition treaty with Dubai however authorized commentators say it isn’t efficient.
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Twenty-four different individuals have been convicted throughout 5 trials between 2011 and 2014, and a complete of 116 years and 7 months’ imprisonment handed down.
The convictions adopted a joint investigation between HM Income and Customs and Lancashire police, which additionally secured jail sentences totalling greater than 116 years for twenty-four different gang members.
Richard Las, director of the fraud investigation service at HMRC, mentioned: “Arif Patel lived a lavish lifestyle at the expense of the law-abiding majority but he will now lose the property empire he amassed from the proceeds of crime.
“Our work never stops at conviction. For the last two years we’ve worked with police and CPS partners to secure one of the biggest criminal confiscations we’ve ever recovered.
“Tens of millions of pounds of stolen money will now go back to directly to fund public services.”
