Over the past twelve months HMRC prosecuted a broad range cases through the courts 
including millionaires, those with offshore accounts, a would-be spy, accountants, data thieves and organised criminal gangs.
As a result HMRC’s fraud investigations led to 762 individuals being convicted with sentences totalling more than 1,000 years. In addition, HMRC has charged suspects in over 1,000 new cases of tax fraud.
Convictions were secured for pocketing employees’ income tax contributions, failing to declare income and offering fake tax breaks to wealthy investors, as well as tax credits and fuel fraud.
These ten most significant cases each came with large prison sentences. They include:
- Six men from the South East jailed for a total of 45 years after persuading wealthy individuals to invest in largely fake environmental projects. A ten year investigation revealed the scheme was nothing more than a £108m fraud, using a complex series of offshore banking and paper transactions.
- A pair of London fraudsters who evaded £46.5 million in tax by smuggling wine into the UK sentenced to a total of 17 and a half years in prison. They laundered the proceeds of the fraud using a string of bank accounts.
- A millionaire businessman from Kent who failed to file a single return or pay £1.3m in tax because he wasn’t a ‘paperwork person’, jailed for four years.
- A gang of international alcohol smugglers jailed for a total of 19 years after smuggling beer into the UK and evading £3.8 million in duty and VAT.
- A Dubai-based British businessman, who financed a major cigarette smuggling gang, stripped of prime Thames-side land to pay back £4.5 million.
- Nine people, including the owner of a Belfast based fuel supply company, sentenced for laundering, concealing and distributing about 4.5 million litres of red diesel worth £2.6 million in lost duty and taxes.
- A Kings Lynn man who told his family and friends he was a spy travelling abroad when in reality he was visiting holiday homes bought with the proceeds of a £1.6 million VAT fraud.
- The evasion of £17 million in lost excise duty and VAT from the manufacture of illegal tobacco products that cost three men a total of 16 years in jail sentences.
- A former Ascot man who hijacked details of an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands to commit a £640,000 fraud, jailed for three years and seven months.
- A wannabe TV presenter from south Wales who was part of a gang of four involved in a £400,000 VAT fraud, jailed for a total of seven years.
HMRC has made clear that they will continue to pursue people who evade paying the tax they owe using the courts to prosecute. HMRC uses the full range of both criminal and civil powers to investigate tax cheats, and is successful in more than 93% of the prosecutions undertaken. HMRC will always look to recover the proceeds from any crime committed to secure the funds for the public purse.
