A used car dealer who was convicted of selling ‘clocked’ vehicles in 2006 has been ordered to pay an extra £146,000 in fines after a recent National Crime Agency (NCA) investigation.
Akif Rashid Butt, 52, from Pudsey, West Yorkshire, will be forced to pay back the amount after the NCA uncovered that he had paid the original confiscation order of £154,000, but with hidden assets.
When Mr Butt was arrested in 2006, he was charged with illegally reducing the odometers of high mileage cars, with a view to sell them on at inflated prices to unaware customers.
In 2005, West Yorkshire Trading Standards investigated Mr Butt’s car dealership – known at the time as ‘Cars R Us’ – which resulted with Mr Butt being charged and pleading guilty to 15 offences relating to 12 fraudulently ‘clocked’ vehicles. Mr Butt received six months imprisonment and a Confiscation Order to forfeit the proceeds of his crimes, which after an audit by the Assets Recovery Agency, assessed he had made a total of £890,471.80 in criminal benefit.
In 2009, Mr Butt was ordered to pay back a total of £154,000, an amount based on his assessed assets including a small property portfolio and also taking into account cash on hand. The balance was paid in full by October 2010.
But further investigation by the NCA’s Asset Confiscation Enforcement team recently identified that, despite paying the court ordered sum, Mr Butt had still held onto various assets on which the original confiscation order was based, forfeiting interest in one property to the value of £50,000 but retaining two properties assessed for the order, with equity assessed at a value of £98,930 at the time and paying his original confiscation order by utilising other funds.
According to a report from The Bradford Telegraph and Argus newspaper, Mr Butt accepted that the available amount in the confiscation order granted in 2009 be increased to £300,000, in light of the uncovering of new assets by the NCA team.
The court ordered that the full amount is to be paid within three months, with a period of 27 months imprisonment in default, it said.
Andy Lewis, Head of Asset Denial at the NCA, said: “Over ten years had passed since Mr Butt was served his initial confiscation order, and it’s likely he thought that he had got away with retaining assets subject of the original confiscation order.
“This should serve as a reminder to criminals that there is a debt to be paid for criminal activity, and the NCA are relentless in their pursuit of criminal assets.”
Keyword: Used car dealer ordered to pay an extra £146,000 after conviction over a decade ago