Wolverhampton tax expert and boss in £5m swindle are jailed
A Wolverhampton tax expert and a fellow boss of a city pensions company were today starting eight-and-a-half year jail terms after being found guilty of a £5 million fraud.
Andrew Meeson was once president of the Association of Taxation Technicians, a professional body telling other people how to comply with tax law.
The 51-year-old, of George Street, Wolverhampton, was jailed yesterday for a fraud centred on two pensions schemes he administered with a fellow company director Peter Bradley, of The Forge, Springhill Lane, Lower Penn.
Meeson and Bradley, aged 46, ran Tudor Capital Management Limited, which was based in George Street, Wolverhampton, and had offices in Derby, from which they administered 300 legitimate pensions schemes.
From 2006 however, jurors heard they set up the two bogus schemes under the name Moya, and used these as the cover for their fraud. Under the scam, they claimed to have received £20 million worth of pensions contributions between June 2007 and March 2010 and pocketed £5m in income tax repayments.
Doubts however arose and HM Revenue and Customs launched an investigation which uncovered the contributions came from non-existent clients.
Simon De Kayne, Assistant Director of Criminal Investigation for HMRC, said: "This was blatant theft from the UK economy by people who exploited their positions of trust."
Meeson and Bradley were first arrested in dawn raids by HMRC in 2010 and charged last November, a week after Meeson's presidency of ATT ended.
Investigators today revealed details of how the pair spent their ill-gotten gains. Meeson, who is single, once bought a girlfriend a £400,000 house in Solihull.
Bradley, a married father-of-one, meanwhile had an impressive property portfolio and collected guns, HMRC said, adding that court proceedings were now in motion to seize assets bought with the proceeds of their fraud.
Meeson previously worked for the Inland Revenue, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the Clerical Medical Investment Group.
A trustee of the pension fund, Steven Price, 48, of Studley, also pleaded guilty at Birmingham Crown Court to obtaining documents by deception, and was given an 18 month prison sentence – suspended for two years.
He was also ordered to pay a fine of £100,000 within six months.
