Bradford man jailed for mortgage fraud
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A Bradford man has been jailed for 18 months for charges of fraud and money laundering.
His conviction follows an international money laundering investigation conducted by the North East Regional Asset Recovery Team.
Shamsher Khan of Holme Farm Barn, Bradford, was convicted of two counts of mortgage fraud and six counts of money laundering offences on August 12 2010.
During Khan’s trial the court heard how hundreds of thousands of pounds of stolen money was transferred to accounts based in Spain. It was alleged that some of this stolen money was sent back to the UK to fund Khan’s purchase of Holme Farm Barn in 2004.
In May of that year, £100,000 was transferred from the bank account of Barronal SL, a Spanish company based in Marbella, to the account of Ajvinder Singh in Birmingham. The money was then forwarded to a Bradford solicitor who acted for Khan in the purchase of Holme Farm Barn.
Having purchased the property in what was effectively a cash deal Khan raised two mortgages against it generating over £350,000 in cash of which £100,000 was used in a further property purchase and £100,000 of which was sent to an account in the name of Ajvinder Singh in Dubai.
The court heard that Khan lied in respect of his employment status in his mortgage applications. He said that he worked in the field of IT for a company based in Bradford, earning over £100,000 per year when he was, in fact, unemployed.
Detective chief inspector Lisa Atkinson, head of NE RART, says: “It is clear that Shamsher Khan closely associated with a Bradford based Organised Crime Group that spanned the length of this country and overseas, whose members were used to launder large sums of money stolen from innocent members of the public”.
“Fraud, often perceived as victimless is far from it. The money it generates is used to fund the lifestyle of negative role models in society or is ploughed back into other forms of criminality such as drugs and firearms causing harm to the communities in which we live. The pursuit of Khan, his conviction, potential imprisonment and subsequent confiscation proceedings he now faces should make it clear that the RART’s will continue to target people who involve themselves in serious and organised crime.”
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