Chauhan Vijay Yogendrasinh, who was convicted in October of being involved in a multi-million pound money laundering operation whose destinations included India and Hong Kong, has been jailed for eight years following a widely-followed trial.
Leicester-based Yogendrasinh, 55, was the director of Rushi Investments Limited, a company which appeared to be a legitimate money transfer service, but was actually found to be a money laundering operation transferring criminal money overseas.
The case was followed closely in Leicester, a town in the East Midlands that has a large population of Indian origin with close links to several Indian states.
Investigations by the East Midlands Special Operations Unit’s Regional Asset Recovery Team found that more than £11,000,000 had gone through his company. While some of the money was transferred legally, millions of pounds were transferred illegally through different bank accounts and companies abroad.
“It is not known what criminal enterprise this money came from but police work, which included uncovering huge amounts of cash and numerous false documents, proved that money laundering had been committed”, the Leicestershire police said.
Yogendrasinh denied his involvement but following a seven-week trial at the court, he was found guilty last month of conspiracy to transfer criminal property between January 2011 and March 2016. He was sentenced to eight years imprisonment on Thursday and also disqualified from being a company director for eight years.
Investigations showed that his company used legitimate money service bureaus, misleading the companies so that they would transfer the money abroad. This was done through false lists of people which were created to try and explain where the large amounts of money being deposited had come from.
Some invoices of transactions made overseas were also found to be false. CCTV and surveillance work showed that while it was suggested that dozens of people had been attending the business daily in order to deposit money, this was not correct.
Large amounts of cash had passed through the personal bank accounts of Yogendrasinh which did not match up to what had been declared to tax authorities. Investigations also revealed the practice of ‘cuckoo smurfing’: when a person unwittingly allows bank account to be used to deposit money.
The victims of this were expecting a large cash payment into their bank accounts, but the money had come from Yogendrasinh’s company using criminal funds. The bank accounts were being used to try and disguise the origin and destination of the cash, the police said.
Detective constable Grant Bailey said: “This was an operation which involved millions of pounds of criminal cash being transferred illegally. A complex police investigation which involved tireless hours of examining documents, checking financial records and carrying out CCTV inquiries – amongst other work – meant that we were able to prove what ‘business’ was actually being run by Rushi Investments”.
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