The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
EX-DJ guilty
A former Dundee DJ has been found guilty of scams which cheated the government out of millions of pounds in VAT.
A FORMER DJ who claimed he inspired an award-winning Ken Loach film has been found guilty of scams which cheated the Government out of millions of pounds in VAT.
Former marketing consultant, pop promoter and nightclub boss Shahid “Shy” Ramzan claimed to be an ambitious entrepreneur buying and selling mobile phones.
A jury yesterday added “fraudster” and “money launderer” to his CV.
A marathon trial heard how Ramzan (40) began trading from a bedroom at Cortachy Crescent, Broughty Ferry, with only a telephone, fax machine and a computer to access the internet.
Prosecutors claimed his international wheeler-dealing was only a cover for his real business – exploiting loopholes inVAT regulations, along with others who were playing the same game.
Ramzan even set up front companies as a way of exporting his dirty money from Scotland.
At the High Court in Edinburgh a jury found him guilty of five charges – evading, either alone or with others, VAT payments to the tune of £5,611,839 between October 2002 and July 2004.
They also found him guilty of transferring or hiding “criminal property” amounting to a total of £20,610,213.
Judge Lord Brailsford remanded Ramzan in custody and called for background reports. He is due to return to court for sentence, in Glasgow, next month.
The verdicts ended court proceedings which began in late 2007.
Three years earlier investigators had raided the former post office building in Dundee’s Meadowside which Ramzan wanted to be a prestige nightclub in the city.
They took aw ay b o xe s of purchase orders, invoices, emails and other computer records revealing the activities of companies linked to Ramzan.
The paper trail exposing some two years of multi-million-pound deals filled 150 large lever-arch files as the case was put together. One of the Crown’s 55 witnesses took nine days in the witness box to explain the accounts.
On October 1 this year a trial began at the High Court in Edinburgh, with experts explaining how Missing Trader Intra Community VAT fraud worked.
Roderick Stone, a veteran customs officer, said the frauds involved tricking the authorities into refunding VAT which had never actually been paid.
An importer would buy goods – zero rated because they came from another European Union country.
When resold in the UK, the new customer would pay VAT but the importer would not hand it over to the authorities.
After passing from one so-called “buffer” company to another, a broker would finally export the same items, claiming a VAT refund.
Ramzan’s companies played the parts of “buffer” and “missing trader” at different times during his scams.
During the trial, former research scientist Jayne Ramzan (40) – formerly married to Ramzan’s brother – was cleared of involvement in evadingVAT totalling £ 3.2 million.
Ramzan now faces an attempt by the authorities to claw back the profits he made from his frauds.
When Ramzan, told his side of the story, the jury heard about his brief film career.
Although a bit-part player in Ken Loach’s film Ae Fond Kiss – a comedy about a romance between an Asian DJ and a Catholic girl – Ramzan insisted it was partly based on his life story.