Family stole £45m in VAT scam to fund their lavish lifestyle
A FAMILY enjoyed the high life on £45million stolen from the taxpayer through a VAT scam.
Geoffrey Copp, 56, his brother Andrew, 50, and his son Joshua, 24, bought racehorses, a fleet of luxury cars, jewellery, UK mansions and villas in Spain.
They ran companies that provided payroll services to recruitment firms, adding VAT at 20 per cent on their invoices. The Copps declared that they had earned £20million and forwarded £4million in VAT when in fact they had raked in £250million and should have paid nearly £50million in VAT, Wood Green Crown Court heard.
Instead they kept the money for themselves. Records also showed that Geoffrey Copp and his son paid no income tax between 2009 and 2015, while his brother paid just £15,930.
The scam came to light after information was passed to police, resulting in an investigation. Officers who raided their homes found all the trappings of a lavish lifestyle.
Geoffrey Copp owned four mansions in the UK and one in Malaga. At his home in Stanmore, North London, police found £55,000 cash, some of it hidden inside a Bentley GTC Convertible on the driveway.
He had bought three Bentley Continentals for cash between 2013 and 2015, owned racehorses and had spent nearly £ 300,000 on private flights between July 2014 and January 2015. Andrew Copp owned eight homes, including one in Malaga. At his house in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, were a Range Rover Vogue, a Lamborghini Gallardo, a Bentley Continental, several Rolex watches and works of art.
Joshua Copp lived in a £4million home described in court as an ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ of luxury goods including Rolex and Audemars Piguet watches, gold and designer clothes.
He was in the process of buying a £4.25million property in Barnet, North London, and among the nine cars registered to him were a Ferrari F12 Berlinetta, a Lamborghini Aventador, a Bentley Continental, a Rolls- Royce Wraith and a Rolls-Royce Ghost. There were pictures of him posing in private jets, with bundles of cash and in casinos – he could easily lose up to £1million in a single gambling session in Las Vegas.
On his mobile phone, detectives found a photo of a notepad showing calculations of how the VAT fraud operated and how the proceeds were shared with his father and uncle. The notepad was found at their firm, Quality and Premiere Services, previously Central Payroll Specialists, in Rickmansworth near Watford.
The three denied conspiracy to cheat the public revenue and money laundering between February 2012 and December 2015. They claimed they had left VAT payments to their accountant and did not know they had underpaid. However, they were convicted and will be sentenced on Friday.
Accountant Simon Hathaway, 51, whose firm was paid £400,000 in two years by the Copps, was acquitted of false accounting and conspiracy to cheat the public revenue.
Afterwards Detective Chief Inspector Josie Hayes, of the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate, said it was ‘a highly organised payroll fraud on a scale never before seen in the UK’ and the Copps ‘shamelessly took money destined for the public purse to fill their own wallets and brazenly fund extravagant lifestyles, which were beyond the means of many, including the workers whose wages they managed’.