Mridul Das and Mohammed Hoque are currently serving seven year prison sentences for a £1.2m VAT fraud they carried out between 2003 and 2011.

However, their arrests in February 2012 did not deter them from continuing the fraud while awaiting their trial and subsequent imprisonment, by masquerading behind three frontmen who claimed to be responsible for their restaurants, Moza Indian in Basildon and Memsaheb on Thames in the Docklands area of London.

Abu Kadir, Sheikh Hussain, and Ashraful Haque continued with the scam. HMRC’s investigation found the five men pocketed the VAT they charged their customers, liquidated companies with debts to HMRC and then created ‘new’ companies to come in and take over where the previous one left off. In total, they stole £600,000 between November 2011 and March 2015.

Their accountant, Anil Shah, was fined £25,000 on 5 October 2016 for obstructing HMRC’s investigation by failing to comply with a disclosure notice.

David Margree, assistant director, fraud investigation service, HMRC, said: ‘These men stole money from honest taxpayers in an incredibly brazen way. In spite of HMRC’s first investigation in February 2012, they felt that they were above the law and could not be caught.’

At Southwark Crown Court, both Hoque and Das pleaded guilty to two counts of cheating the public revenue and were each sentenced to a consecutive jail sentence of two and a half years. They will now serve a total sentence of nine and a half years, and have both been disqualified from acting as a director for ten years.

Kadir was found guilty of one count of cheating the public revenue, and was jailed for ten months, suspended for two years and ordered to carry out 250 hours of unpaid work.  Hussain was jailed for ten months, suspended for two years and ordered to carry out 100 hours of unpaid work. Haque was sentenced to ten months in prison, but his current whereabouts are unknown.

Confiscation proceedings to recover the proceeds of their crimes will now follow.