Aoife Madden has been served with an order to refund £2,525 from the proceeds of £798,950 she made as part of a bogus team of film producers, who were the first to be prosecuted by HMRC for film tax relief fraud in 2013.

Madden  received a prison term of four years and eight months for her part in the plot and has now been told she faces a further 45 days in prison if she does not make the repayment within six months.

The leader of the gang was Bashar Al-Issa, from London, who worked along with Tariq Hassan, of Essex, and Ian Sherwood and Osama Al Baghdady, both of Manchester.

They set up a company called  Evolved Pictures and told their auditors that they had a budget of over £19m provided by a Jordanian company to produce a blockbuster film in the UK starring a cast list of Hollywood A listers.

Evolved Pictures told HMRC that millions of pounds of work had been spent on the film, including paying actors and film set managers, claiming this meant a VAT repayment was due of £1,488,187. However, during checks HMRC found that the work had not been done and most of the so-called suppliers and film studios had never heard of the gang. Furthermore, Evolved made fraudulent film tax relief claims of £256,385, while preparing to submit a further claim of £1,033,337.

After they were arrested, the gang came up with an elaborate plan to cover their tracks and hide the fraud by shooting a film on a shoestring called ‘A Landscape of Lies’ which lasted for just eight minutes of footage and cost less than £100,000 to produce.

They produced fake scripts and documents to add a veneer of legitimacy to the project, and also falsely claimed to have  signed up former EastEnders star and Loose Women presenter Andrea McLean, along with Hollyoaks star Christina Bailey, veteran Jeremy Irons and actress Sorcha Cusack.

HMRC’s investigations found that none of this was true, and at Southwark Crown Court in March 2013 ringleader Al-Issa was jailed for six-and-a-half years. He has now been ordered to pay back £486,273 or face a further four years in jail.

Of the rest of the group, Al-Baghdady faces an additional 35 days in jail on top of his original four-year sentence if he does not pay back £1,469 within three months. Sherwood must repay £1,000, which was also the amount he earned from the fraud, within 28 days or face two weeks in prison in addition to his three-and-a-half year sentence.

Hassan was jailed for four years but the amount he is to repay has yet to be determined.

Sign up to our newsletter

If you would like to receive regular news alerts about breaking news and developments in tax, accounting and audit, sign up to receive our free newsletter here