£10m fraudster’s life in the fast lane
Brazen VAT scammer had fleet of supercars
A BUSINESSMAN who carried out a £9.8million fraud to fund a fleet of supercars, a huge property portfolio and a luxurious lifestyle in Spain has been jailed for nine years.
Jason Butler, 46, once boasted that ‘fast cars are in my blood’ and spoke of his ambition to be rich enough to retire at 35.
But the would-be tycoon, who qualified as an accountant after leaving school at 16, turned to fraud to pay for his supercar obsession and glamorous lifestyle. He devised a sophisticated VAT fraud and used a complex trading chain of international companies to hide his scam from the authorities.
Butler told HMRC he had bought almost £60million worth of personal data relating to payment protection insurance, and produced purchase invoices to claim back £9,875,806 in VAT. In reality, he was trading cheap raw data and forging the invoices.
Butler used a Leeds-based company he controlled to pull off the fraud, which also involved firms in Gibraltar, Spain and the US. Far from hiding his ill-gotten gains, Butler, formerly of Leeds, flaunted them brazenly. He lived in a luxurious home in Marbella with a private pool and also owned 96 properties in Leeds.
Other luxury items included a speedboat named El Jefe (‘the boss’ in Spanish), and his fleet of cars. They included a Ferrari 458 – list price £170,000 – along with a Rolls- Royce Silver Shadow, Mercedes SL350 and a Lamborghini Murcielago.
Expensive cars appear to have been his driving force since childhood. After working in insurance Butler started his first business at 22 and a year later spent £75,000 on a Ferrari. Less than a decade later, with his property and financial services businesses expanding, the married father of two had also acquired two Mercedes, two Porsches and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
But a string of his companies collapsed and Butler turned to VAT fraud. The good times ended abruptly when he was arrested at Manchester Airport after flying in from Malaga in January 2015.
Butler stood trial for the complicated VAT fraud at Leeds Crown Court and was found guilty of effectively stealing millions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash. He was jailed on Monday.
After the hearing Eden Noblett, assistant director of HMRC’s fraud investigation service, said: ‘Butler stole enough money to pay for more than 500 new NHS nurses. We will not allow anyone to steal funding from our schools and hospitals.’ Proceedings are under way to recover the money.