Ex-Police Officer Jailed For VAT Fraud

A former police officer has been jailed after admitting playing a leading role in the largest VAT fraud of its kind.

Nigel Cranswick headed up the huge conspiracy to cheat HMRC out of £365m - a plot which took officers 25 years of work to investigate.

The 47-year-old ex-South Yorkshire Police officer from Sheffield was a director of Ideas 2 Go and claimed it bought and sold £2.4bn of goods in just eight months from June 2005.

He has since admitted the firm's trading, largely in mobile phones and computer software, was fictitious, and the aim was to generate paperwork from fake sales in order to claim back a fortune in VAT from HMRC.

Judge Forster, sitting at Newcastle Crown Court, said: "This case concerned planned dishonesty resulting in the loss to the Revenue in the region of £365m.

"There were purported sales of billions of pounds.

"The prosecution rightly described the case as an unprecedented attack on the Revenue.

"The case has taken 25 man years to investigate."

He added that the figures in the case were "astonishing" and they revealed the "blatant nature of the fraud".

He told Cranswick: "You were immediately before this fraud a serving police officer. Almost unbelievably you retired from the police force and became the organiser of this fraudulent operation.

"You set up the company, you clearly accepted the direction of others - the organisers who are not before the court."

Cranswick was recruited to play his role in the carousel fraud by others - a type of fraud which involves importing goods from other EU states which are then sold through contrived business-to-business transactions.

Outside court, HMRC said Cranswick had gone from "rags to riches" soon after retiring, despite having been heavily in debt as a police officer.

He made expensive improvements to his home, rented a flat in Marbella, Spain and paid for private schools and tennis lessons for his children.

Cranswick nodded as the judge sentenced him to 10 years and three months in jail.

He styled himself as a singer-songwriter and was the lead singer with a band called Not The Police.

Also sentenced after admitting conspiracy to cheat the Revenue were Thomas Murphy, 27, who was jailed for four and a half years; Cranswick's brother-in-law, Darren Smyth, 42, and Brian Olive, 56, who were sentenced to three years and four months each; and former housing officer Andrew Marsh, 28, who was jailed for two years and eight months.

Cranswick's 44-year-old sister, Clare Reid, married to Smyth, was handed a nine-month sentence, suspended for 18 months, and ordered to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work after admitting two counts of false accounting.