Businessman funded a lavish life of luxury cars and Spanish home through £9m fraud

A BUSINESSMAN who masterminded a sophisticated £9.8m international VAT fraud to fund his lavish lifestyle of flash cars and a luxury Spanish home has been jailed for nine years.

Jason Butler, 46, formerly of Leeds, created hundreds of false invoices to steal millions of pounds in VAT and tried to hide the scam in a complex trading chain involving companies in the UK, Gibraltar, Spain and America.

Butler, who now lives in Spain, told HMRC he bought personal data worth almost £60m, but checks revealed this was a lie.

In reality he was forging purchase invoices to falsely reclaim VAT and trading very cheap raw data through a complex international supply chain in a bid to hide his crimes.

Butler, who previously ran a number of companies in Yorkshire which were part of Jump Group Ltd, used money from the fraud to fund a vast portfolio of properties in Leeds.

He also owned a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, a speedboat, a luxurious home in Marbella and 96 properties in Leeds. Butler controlled a company called Multi Level Media (MLM), based at Britannia House in Leeds. He said he bought and sold valuable payment protection insurance (PPI) customer data from nine UK companies via an international agency which he also controlled, between November 2011 and January 2015.

Checks with the companies revealed that no trade ever took place and Butler had created hundreds of fake invoices.

Instead he was buying and selling cheap raw data to a series of firms in the UK, who then sold it to a respectable data company in Gibraltar.

The data was sold by them to a company in America, which was also controlled by Butler. He tried to hide his fraud by involving several companies.

Butler used money from the fraud to fund his collection of supercars including a Ferrari Fiorano FI, Ferrari 360, MercedesBenz SL350 and a Lamborghini Murcielago.

Eden Noblett, of HMRC, said: “Butler thought he was clever and his scam too sophisticated to be uncovered.

“But he was not as clever as he believed. This case should serve as a warning to anyone considering stealing taxpayer’s money.”