Ben FitzGerald represented a company director indicted for conspiracy to cheat the Revenue, involving an allegation that £109m of tax was placed at risk.
The prosecution was part of the HMRC’s ‘Operation Amazon’, a complex multi-jurisdictional investigation into a sham carbon credit trading scheme.
In 2015, Ben and others secured a stay of the proceedings for abuse of process due to prosecution disclosure failures. Although the stay was later overturned, the case is now reported as R v R and others [2015] EWCA Crim 1941 and is a leading authority on disclosure.
The nine-month trial in 2017 involved Ben in novel legal argument concerning the ambit of the offence of Cheating the Revenue, leading to the dismissal of one of the core conspiracy counts on the indictment. Ongoing confiscation proceedings involve complex financial and legal analysis.
For more information, please see the Financial Times.
Ben FitzGerald KC