Jail for gang caught laundering £87m made by smuggling illegal booze

Eight members of a Berkshire-based gang which laundered £87million pounds they had made by smuggling alcohol have been jailed for a combined total of more than 46 years.

The men used a complex system of setting up and then closing companies to distribute and sell on their smuggled alcohol. In the process they created a false trail of paperwork and robbed the public purse of £34million pounds in unpaid VAT.

The gang operated from an office in Eton High Street and then moved their operation to Windsor during the two year scheme. Detectives seized computers, £370,000 in cash and business records while carrying out more than 20 raids across London, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey and East Sussex. The gang were eventually caught by hidden cameras which investigators installed in one of their offices.

Pictured above, the ringleaders were Jayesh Shah, Riaz Khan, Fiaz Raja and Muhammad Rasool.

For their respective parts in the gang Riaz Khan from Windsor and Muhammad Rasool from Slough were jailed for eight years; Jayesh Shah from Wembley to seven-and-a-half years; Fiaz Raja from Slough to six years; Both Divyesh Karsan from London and Salmon Ahmed from Brentford to five years and two months; Sameer Dhanji from Slough and Geoffrey Hayes from Hove to three years and six months.

A ninth man, Waqas Aslam (not pictured) aged 38 of Church Road in Hayes, was convicted of cheating the public revenue, contrary to common law. He was handed a 26 week jail sentence suspended for 24 months and 150 hours unpaid work.

Investigators from Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) using the hidden cameras captured footage of the gang explaining how the scheme worked. Evidence showed that £87m was laundered in more than 50 bank accounts in Britain, Hong Kong, Dubai and other foreign countries.