Refuting the evidence

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 […]

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New lines of enquiry

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 […]

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Tesco fraud trial collapses

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 […]

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On the trail of dirty money

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 […]

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Rush to fill economic crime jobs

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 […]

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Lavish lifestyle clue to crime

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 […]

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Taxman tackles financial crime

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. […]

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Two acquitted over tax fraud

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 […]

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Former Autonomy boss charged with fraud in the US

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) […]

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Cleared of financial impropriety

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 […]

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More financial investigators needed to cut serious and organised crime

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 […]

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Deep forensic accountancy

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 […]

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Defending against accusations

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 […]

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There’s no getting away with it

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 […]

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Criminals using cryptocurrency to launder fraud money

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 […]

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Losses from corporate employee fraud have doubled in the last year

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 […]

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Calls for oligarch investigation

The former head of one of the Ukraine’s biggest banks is currently in the High Court accused of defrauding the bank through a “complex string of financial transactions”. Gennadiy Bogolyubov is also at the centre of a row over how and why he was given a “golden” visa to live in the UK and buy […]

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New UK aid programmes will stop “dirty money”

As Prime Minister Theresa May visits Kenya, International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt has announced a series of aid programmes that will help to recover millions of pounds of illegal assets. As Ms Mordaunt pointed out, illicit finance sees “dirty money” diverted away from people in poor countries to individuals involved in crime, terrorism and fraud. […]

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Documents could hold the key

A Russian oligarch has been ordered by a High Court judge to make documents available relating to his finances after it was deemed that he has taken “numerous elaborate steps” to hide his wealth. Farkhad Akhmedov, a former oil and gas trader who made his fortune in the Russian energy sector was found to be […]

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A forensic investigation will leave nothing unexamined

There has been a lot of news recently about how a forensic linguist helped to convict a murderer by identifying tiny differences in his writing habits to that of his victim. In this case, an experienced forensic linguist revealed how differences in the murderer’s punctuation helped to prove that the texts he sent from his […]

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HMRC investigating wealthy taxpayers

A Freedom of Information (FoI) request has found that HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is using its ‘offshore, corporate and wealthy unit’ to investigate more than 800 UK taxpayers with assets in offshore tax havens. The taxman’s target is to prosecute 100 wealthy individuals and corporates a year until 2020. This series of prosecutions stems […]

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Old-fashioned but effective

The case of fraudsters being thwarted by financial investigators using “good, old-fashioned detailed assessment” and interviews illustrates how vital it is for forensic accountants to use traditional methods of enquiry as well as more technologically advanced techniques. Recently, teams of financial investigators have been brought in to prevent fraud in East Anglia by people trying […]

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Divorcing in England

The German wife of a millionaire banker raced to file a divorce petition in England after she discovered that her husband had taken his mistress to the office party. However, although Catja Thum filed a petition in England on 26 October 2015, Mr Thum claims that he knew nothing of his wife’s decision until the […]

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California dreaming?

If a spouse is caught trying to hide his or her assets in a divorce case in California, the court has the ability to award 100 per cent of the value of the assets to the other party. While the law is not so draconian in the UK, it is never a good idea to […]

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The truth will come out

A recent case of financial impropriety that was dropped after a thorough investigation shows that a forensic inspection of records can exonerate, as well as convict defendants. The former Chairman of Leeds Ladies FC was arrested in May 2017 over fraud claims but police have now ended the investigation. A police spokesperson said there was […]

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