According to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), five people have been arrested and questioned over alleged accounting fraud at Patisserie Valerie, although Luke Johnson, Patisserie Valerie’s former chairman and a columnist for The Sunday Times, was not among those arrested. Mr Johnson, who was the firm’s largest shareholder when it failed in January with the […]
A tax thief and money launderer has been landed with a bill for £615,000, which he must pay or face extra time in jail. Raymond Thomas was jailed for four years in November 2017, after an HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) investigation found he had stolen £1.6 million. In an attempt to hide his crime, […]
Recent research suggests that middle-aged people are increasingly – and often unwittingly – being targeted by criminal gangs to launder money. According to fraud prevention service Cifas, the number of so-called ‘money mules’ aged between 40 and 60 increased by 35 per cent in 2019 compared with 2017. A money mule, sometimes called a ‘smurfer’, […]
Shares in Kraft Heinz rose after the food giant announced it had completed an accounting investigation and changed its financial practices accordingly. The business finally filed its results to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) having concluded its internal investigation into accounting irregularities in its procurement division. The filing, completed more than three months late, […]
A recent First Tier Tribunal (FTT) case highlights that not only must a case argument contain all of the relevant information but that this information must be presented clearly or the evidence upholding the argument becomes impenetrable. As any psychiatrist would agree, no two minds think in exactly the same way, but most people think […]
Financial investigators have discovered that the digital wallets of the QuadrigaCX exchange had been emptied of millions in cryptocurrency months before founder Gerald Cotten died.
Yet again the work of the forensic accountant has come to the public’s attention via television. In this week’s episode of Shetland, DI Jimmy Perez asks one of his sergeants to get ‘the forensic team’ to find out how a suspect in a people trafficking case made his money.
Investors who put savings into high risk mini-bonds with London Capital & Finance (LCF), totalling £236 million, are fearful about what has happened to their money after the firm’s recent collapse.
Home Secretary Sajid Javid has recently agreed to the extradition of Indian billionaire Vijay Mallya back to India to face charges of alleged fraud and money laundering to an estimated Rs 90 billion. However, Mr Mallya’s position has always been that there is “no evidence to justify” his extradition. The case started back in 2013 […]
Police have been handed evidence from a year-long investigation into financial irregularities allegedly committed by the former Chief Executive of the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), Jeremy Newmark. An investigation began in March 2018 after a leaked document alleged financial impropriety against Mr Newmark, who stood down as Chief Executive in 2013 on the grounds of […]
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is now investigating how celebrity “influencers” endorse products online and is including the role of the social media platforms they use in its investigation. The consumer protection and competition watchdog has told these influencers that they must tell their followers if they are being paid or otherwise rewarded to […]
The former UK Finance Director of Tesco, Carl Rogberg, was cleared this week of fraud and false accounting, while another trial of Tesco’s former UK CEO and the former Commercial Director collapsed last month after the judge ruled the evidence to be “too weak”. Both trials were brought on the allegation that the supermarket’s profits […]
The National Crime Agency (NCA) has seized an 8.9 carat Cartier diamond ring worth more than £1 million from the wife of an Azerbaijani banker. The ring, which was bought in Harrods in 2011 by Jahangir Hajiyev for his wife Zamira for £1,190,000 plus VAT, was seized at a London jewellers, where it had been […]
The Financial Times has run an article on how financial crime vacancies in the legal sector are soaring because of the explosion of cases to both prosecute and defend. Because of the size of these cases, many of which are global in reach, people who would otherwise never have been implicated in such issues are […]
HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has recently published its ‘Top 10’ successful prosecutions for tax crimes over the past 12 months. The cases include a variety of perpetrators, from business people and church leaders to the masterminds behind organised crime. All the cases involved painstaking, forensic financial investigation, much of it on a global scale. […]
A bungling businessman who was caught with drugs to the value of £77,500 has been handed a confiscation order under the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) for £4.5 million because of his lavish spending. Peter Carroll was arrested in 2013 and caught with cannabis plants with a street value of around £77,500. However, following a […]
Former Chief Executive of Autonomy, Michael Lynch and his Vice President for Finance, Stephen Chamberlain, have been formally charged with fraud in the USA. The charge, which carries a maximum term of 20 years, relates to the sale of Autonomy in 2011 to computer giant, Hewlett Packard. The sale was worth £8 billion ($10.3 billion) […]
Two former Directors of supermarket giant Tesco have been acquitted of a £250 million fraud and false accounting charge. The two men had been accused of being aware that income was being wrongly included in the company’s financial records to meet targets and to make Tesco look financially ‘healthier’ than it actually was. However, the […]
A Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) has been cleared of financial impropriety following a forensic investigation, which found no evidence of wrongdoing. Such findings give lie to the belief that a forensic investigation sets out to find the person guilty. However, the work of a forensic accountant is to gather the evidence, examine it […]
It was reported this week that the cost of serious and organised crime to the UK is at least £37 billion a year. According to the National Crime Agency (NCA), the threat posed by this crime is now greater than terrorism. It is therefore not surprising that more financial investigators are needed. Responding to the […]
Mention of forensic accounting made it onto television again recently when one of the investigating officers in Channel 4’s No Offence realised that the team would need to go into “deep forensic accountancy” in a case. The team had been investigating a politician it knew was up to her eyes in a plot that included […]
An annual audit unearthed fraud by a school business manager, but it was only after a six-year investigation that she was finally jailed. The manager and her partner, who lived in Gillingham in Kent, siphoned off money from the school over a period of six months in 2011. They got friends to cash fraudulent cheques […]
Current newspaper accounts state that the US tax authorities are investigating allegations that Donald Trump participated in “dubious tax schemes”, including “instances of outright fraud” that boosted his wealth by hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the reports, the President is said to have received the equivalent of at least $413m (£318m) from his […]
The emergence of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin is beginning to change the face of finance all over the world, but concerns have been raised that the “semi-autonomous and decentralised” nature of these currencies is also attracting the attention of criminals and fraudsters. Earlier this week, Police in Australia arrested a 32-year-old man and a 29-year-old […]
Businesses have reported £88 million in losses in the last year due to corporate employee fraud, according to data obtained from ActionFraud. These figures have doubled in the last year, from £40 million reportedly lost in 2016-2017. Corporate employee fraud includes attempts by employees or ex-employees to obtain remuneration through fraud or to steal money […]