A crooked immigration judge who teamed up with lawyers to fleece the taxpayer out of £1.8 million in a legal aid fraud has been jailed for three years.
Rasib Ghaffar, 54, of Essex, was paid more than £140,000 to represent a client at Bournemouth Crown Court in a case involving Indian restaurants employing illegal immigrants when he was not even there.
The qualified barrister and part-time immigration judge denied but was convicted of conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation with six others including a fellow barrister, solicitors, clerk and costs draftsman.
His wife, solicitor Kareena Maciel, 52, was found unfit to stand trial due to ‘medical problems.’
Solicitors Azhar Khan, 52, and Joseph Ameyaw-Kyeremeh, 73, along with legal clerk Gazi Khan, 52, falsely claimed £1,856,584 in costs relating to the 2011 trial.
Rasib Ghaffar, 54, of Essex, was paid more than £140,000 to represent a client at Bournemouth Crown Court when he was not even there
Ghaffar’s wife, solicitor Kareena Maciel, was found unfit to stand trial due to medical problems
Azhar Khan and Gazi Khan also tried to claim nearly £9m in legal aid relating to two 2012 trials at the Old Bailey and Isleworth Crown Court.
Jailing Gazi Khan for five years last March Judge Philip Bartle, KC, said he was one of the ringleaders in the swindle.
Gazi alone was involved in three legal aid frauds which would have netted £12m if successful.
Ghaffar’s conviction marks the end of a series of expensive trials at Southwark Crown Court dating back to before the pandemic in 2019.
The first trial had to be abandoned in its 10th week in March 2020 when the country went into total lockdown.
Ghaffar was convicted of conspiracy to commit fraud by a jury after 24 hours and three minutes of deliberations.
Judge Bartle earlier described the swindle as ‘an absolutely outrageous, dishonest attempt to get money out of public funds, coupled with a combination of forged documents.’
Ghaffar was a barrister for 23 years until 2018, when he was charged, and had been an immigration tribunal judge from 2006.
The judge said: ‘It is clear that you have a forceful personality. Through no fault of your own, you have been tried three times for this offence.
‘You are now 54 and you came with your family to this country. You were the first person in your family to go to university.
Ghaffar raked in more than £140,000 when he did not even act as an advocate in the case at Bournemouth Crown Court
Joseph Ameyaw-Kyeremeh, 73, (pictured) along with legal clerk Gazi Khan, 52, falsely claimed £1,856,584 in costs relating to a 2011 Bournemouth Crown Court trial
‘You began as a self-employed barrister in 1996 until you ceased to be a barrister in 2018.
‘You have lost your good character, you have lost your reputation, you were of positive good character.
‘You will not be able to rebuild your legal career, you have not been able to work in a legal sense and the effect on your livelihood has already been devastating.
‘The actual or intended victim of the frauds was Her Majesty’s court service.’
The shamed judge had protested his innocence in the dock and said: ‘I’ve never been greedy in my life.
‘I’ve never been taught greed, and I’ll never be greedy until the day I die and I’m six foot under and I just want to make that very clear.’
Prosecutor Paul Sharkey said there were ‘four fraudulent claims for payments of substantial amounts of public money following one set of criminal proceedings that took place at Bournemouth Crown Court.
‘The fraudulent claims were, in part, successful. Of the total of over £1.8 million that was claimed, a sum of £470,000 was paid out.
‘The claims related to the legal costs of four of the defendants in the proceedings.
‘It was because the four defendants were acquitted that it was possible for them to apply for legal costs for defending themselves, and for those costs to be paid by the state.
‘The defendant, Rasib Ghaffar is a barrister and was said to have acted as the advocate for one of the defendants in that case.
‘He received sums totalling over £140,000 from solicitors instructed to represent two of the four defendants.
‘The prosecution say that a lot of the work claimed for had not been done at all. It had not been done, and the costs had not been incurred.’
The prosecutor said the reason Ghaffar and six others ‘hit upon the plan to submit false claims was that, as people who were familiar with the criminal justice system, with the conduct of criminal trials, and they knew that the ‘deal’ meant four of the defendants in the Bournemouth case would be acquitted.
‘That meant that if they could be put forward as genuine private clients, that would create the opportunity to submit false and fraudulent claims to the NTT (National Taxing Team) seeking payment for work done on a private basis that was not actually done at all, or certainly not to the extent stated on the claims.’
Gazi Khan was described in court as one of the ringleaders and jailed for five years
Mr Sharkey said the case at Bournemouth Crown Court in 2011 concerned four brothers, a partnership and a company.
He said: ‘All six were prosecuted in connection with employing staff at two restaurants who, it was said, were unlawfully present in the UK in breach of this country’s immigration laws.
‘A deal was done between the prosecution and the defence. The deal was that two of the Miah brothers would plead guilty, and the case against the other four defendants (the remaining two brothers, and the company and the partnership) would be dropped, and that is what happened.
‘At the end of the case the Crown Court was informed that these four defendants were privately paying clients and weren’t funded by any legal aid, and the crown court was asked to grant a DCO [defendant’s cost order] in favour of each.
‘The DCO entitled their solicitors to submit claims that the four should be compensated for the legal costs they had incurred.
‘It is the prosecution case that in respect of the four separate (but also connected) claims, false representations were made as to the work said to have been done.
‘It is doubtful that these four defendants were private clients at all, in the sense that there is no evidence that either the two brothers, the partnership or the company had paid – or agreed to pay – for their own legal costs.
‘Indeed the two brothers who were acquitted had in fact been granted legal aid, so the state paying for their legal representation, but requests were made to have their legal aid orders withdrawn on the basis that they were going to be paying private funds.’
Mr Sharkey said Ghaffar submitted a £184,000 claim for 350 hours work for one of the defendants in the case when there was ‘no evidence he actually appeared in court as an advocate for any of the defendants, still less the one he claimed to have been the advocate for.’
He continued: ‘A fee note in his name was submitted for £184,000, for which he claimed to have carried out 350 hours of work.
‘Yet the firm who had instructed him and to whom his fee note was addressed had (according to the correspondence) only come into the case seven days before it ended.
‘As with others involved the work he claimed to have carried out was backdated to a time he had not represented the client.
‘He received payments to a total of over £140,000 from one of the firms involved in the case out of public funds they had received from representing one of the private defendants.’
Ghaffar, of South Woodford, east London, denied one count of conspiracy to defraud by false representation to HMCTS between 11 September 2011 and 3 October 2012.
Crooked solicitor Ameyaw-Kyeremeh was handed a two-year sentence suspended for two years back in December 2021 after he was convicted of making claims worth over £1m, through his firm ‘Joseph & Co’.
Azhar Khan, the principal partner in City Law Solicitors Ltd, was sentenced to two years, suspended for two years, in 2023.
Malcolm McHaffie of the CPS said: ‘These convicted defendants defrauded the Legal Aid Agency for their own purposes. They fraudulently took advantage of a statutory scheme which was designed to help acquitted defendants with their genuinely incurred legal costs.
‘The Metropolitan Police and the CPS worked closely together to bring these corrupt legal professionals to justice and are now facing the consequences of their wrongdoing.
‘The CPS will now commence confiscation proceedings in order to reclaim the defendants’ proceeds derived from the fraud.’
