Ali & Anor v Revenue & Customs Prosecutions Office

This is the second time these two applicants have appealed to this court. In June 2005 their appeal against convictions for money laundering were successful ([2005] EWCA Crim 87; [2006] 1 Cr App R 8). The jury had been mis-directed as to the state of mind which the prosecution had to prove to make good accusations of conspiracy to contravene s.49(2) of the Drugs Trafficking Act 1994 or s.93(C)2 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988. In the trial, the subject matter of this appeal, the jury was correctly directed that the prosecution must prove that the conspirators knew that they were laundering proceeds of criminal activity. The appellants were convicted on 10 January 2007 at Leeds Crown Court on their re-trial on two counts of the conspiracy we have identified. The outline of the facts on which the prosecution relied is contained in the judgment of this court in the previous appeal between paragraphs 17-22. For the purposes of this appeal we need only repeat those facts which will illuminate the grounds now advanced.

The Hawala banking business operated by these two applicants through Watan Travel from their premises in Bradford and Birmingham involved five accounts, at first with the Midland Bank and subsequently with the Giro Bank. In the period between 1 September 1997 and 11 February 2001 a sum in the region of £327.7m passed through those five accounts. The two counts on the indictment concerned a sum totalling £170.9m. The distinction between the sums forming the subject matter of the two counts on the indictment and the balance which passed through the five accounts in the relevant period is of importance. The distinction between the sum of approximately £171m which, it was alleged, these applicants knew were the proceeds of criminal activity and the balance stems from the way receipt of that money was recorded by them. Approximately £122m were recorded on what became known at the trial as “rupee lists” in records taken from the premises of Watan Travel on 11 February 2001. These lists did not identify the names of the customers in the United Kingdom who wanted to transfer the money abroad through the Hawala system. But they did identify the names of the people on whose behalf the money had been deposited. The money was recorded in rupees in the right-hand column and the beneficiary was identified.

The figure of approximately £122m was adjusted (by £25m) in favour of the defendants to reflect the fact that the rupee lists only covered the period from December 1997 to August 2000. That left a balance of £180m after the £147m was subtracted from the total sum of approximately £327m.

The records relating to the £171m were different. The totals were recorded in what were described as blue books. Count 1 referred to approximately £46m in cash delivered to Watan on behalf of a conspirator named as Ghulam Mustafa Khan, a partner of Soneri Exchange International in Islamabad. Count 2 related to the sum of £80.6m deposited on behalf of Asif Memon. Those sums were converted into US Dollars and transferred to New York bank accounts of a Dubai-based currency exchange business called World Link Exchange.

One of the blue books showing those transactions was found on a desk at Watan’s premises at Bradford but the other was found hidden in a ceiling and could only be recovered once a ceiling tile had been removed.

Quite apart from the place from which they were discovered, those blue books revealed that the records relating to the sums of the subject matters of counts 1 and 2 were significantly different from the rupee lists. They did not show beneficiaries at all. On the contrary, they merely indicated those on behalf of whom money had been deposited. The defendants’ explanation for the absence of indication of any beneficiary was that they were merely transmitting the money on behalf of, for example, G M Khan or Asif Memon and that the volume of deposits represented an accumulation of cash not directly from a depositor but rather from a number of sources who had themselves collected cash from others. This process was described in the defence case in the original trial as “corporate Hawala” and in the second trial, as “wholesale Hawala”. The important feature said to explain the vast amounts of cash deposited was that Watan Travel was used as a means of transmitting money and converting it into US Dollars by others who had collected and accumulated deposits to Hawaladars from individuals. As the defendants were compelled to accept, they had no means of knowing the original source of the cash or the circumstances in which it had been accumulated. But they trusted those on behalf of whom they were transmitting the money to the United States for conversion into US Dollars and were not themselves concerned with the identity of any ultimate beneficiary. That was the responsibility and concern of those on behalf of whom they transmitted the cash.

We should observe, at this stage, that although at one time the applicants had contested the application of the Money Laundering Regulations 1993 (SI 1993 No 1933) by the time of these proceedings this was not in dispute. Nor did the applicants dispute that there were substantial breaches of the Regulations in relation to the conduct of their financial business and keeping of records. In particular no record had been kept of depositors, contrary to Regulation 12 and no system for identification had been put in place or maintained, contrary to Regulation 5, as explained by Regulation 11. The defendants, themselves, never sought to contend that they could identify the original sources of the substantial amounts of cash which formed the subject matter of the two counts. They merely asserted that the business rested on trust. Further, it is important to record that they admitted that the subject matter of counts 1 and 2 delivered by named conspirators to Watan Travel:-

“…consisted at least in part of the proceeds of crime and/or drug trafficking.”

Accordingly, the only live issue at the trial was whether the prosecution could prove knowledge of that fact on the part of either or both of these applicants.

Both these applicants contend that the prosecution presented their case to the jury in a manner so unfair as to deflect the jury from the true issues in the case and deprive the defendants of a fair and proper opportunity to present their defence. It is contended that the prosecution declined to accept the legitimacy of a proportion of Watan Travel’s trade and thus cast unjustified suspicion over that which was lawful. That Hawala Banking is legitimate could not be disputed but the prosecution failed to make that clear to a jury, inevitably unfamiliar with the arrangements by which individuals, or intermediaries who themselves collected money from individuals, deposit cash with a Hawaladar in the United Kingdom for the purpose of remitting equivalent sums to beneficiaries abroad, frequently in Pakistan. The jury might, accordingly, be startled at the large sums of cash handled by the defendants.

The lack of familiarity of the jury with such a system was, so it was argued, bound to lead to unfairness unless the Crown accepted the legitimacy of the Hawala banking system and, in particular, the legitimacy of the sum of £180m which fell outside the cash, the subject matter of counts 1 and 2. It was contended both before the judge and in these applications that the Crown ought to have accepted that the balance of £180m was cash lawfully handled by Watan Travel in the course of legitimate trade. The failure of the Crown to do so denied the defence a clear concession to which they were entitled. The defence was forced into the unfair position of having to explain that which the Crown itself should have accepted was the course of a legitimate and lawful trade.

It is true that the balance of £180m, calculated in the manner we have identified above, was not the subject of any allegation by the prosecution. But it does not follow that the Crown was bound to accept that it was legitimate. It was clear to the jury, particularly as a result of the directions of the judge, that it was only concerned with the subject matter of counts 1 and 2.

In our judgement the Crown was under no obligation to concede that the balance of £180m represented lawful trade. This, we accept, was unfortunate from the point of view of the defendants. But they had only themselves to blame. They were quite unable to identify the sources of the balance of the cash passing through Watan’s bank accounts. They had chosen not to comply with the 1993 Regulations and they had no record of the sources of that cash. Nor had they taken any steps correctly to identify those sources. In those circumstances, they were in no position to say whether those sums were the proceeds of criminal activity or not. Since they themselves could make no positive assertion as to how the cash had been derived, it hardly lies in their mouths to complain that the prosecution would not admit that the cash was derived from lawful trade. In so far as that allegation forms part of the application relating to irregularities in the trial process, we refuse permission to appeal. That we are unable to apply that refusal to a numbered ground of appeal stems from the manner in which the full and helpful perfected grounds of appeal were advanced. The contentions on behalf of the defendants formed part of ground of appeal B and were more fully dealt with at §§ 96-98 of the written advice on appeal.

Of more substance were the complaints that the prosecution had persisted in relying upon what they described as the circuitous route of the money deposited at Watan Travel. Cash which Watan Travel received from customers was placed by them in their UK bank accounts, at first the Midland Bank and subsequently the Giro Bank. Those funds were then used to purchase dollars. The value of those dollar funds was then transferred to an exchange house either in Dubai (World Link Exchange) or Bahrain, where they would be available for the use of exchange houses in Pakistan. For the purpose of exchanging sterling for dollars it was necessary to use an account in a United States bank correspondent to the United Kingdom bank. The defendants asserted that there was nothing sinister about these movements. On the contrary, they were means by which funds originally deposited were made available in US dollars to those responsible for transferring the value of the sterling to beneficiaries in Pakistan. Many exchange houses would wish to trade in dollars without the need to exchange those dollars into Pakistan rupees. It is significant, as the defendants pointed out, that there was a similar exchange of sterling into dollars even in relation to those funds which were not the subject matter of counts 1 or 2. It was an economic and sensible means of operating the money transmission system in the context that Pakistan rupees could not be purchased outside Pakistan; it was impractical and uneconomic for hard international currency to be sent to Pakistan through its banking system.

During the course of the prosecution’s opening speech, counsel Mr Sells QC said:-

“By far the bulk of the money, 67%, went to the USA…we say that is very significant…(if this was some form of Hawala transmission for members of the Pakistani community, you are entitled to ask why only 14% went to Pakistan and why 67% went to America).”

In consequence of the Crown’s reliance on the transfer of funds to the United States for exchange into dollars the defence called an expert witness, to explain why it was sensible, as part of a legitimate money transmission transaction, to exchange sterling into dollars for use in currency exchange houses. The Crown did not challenge his evidence.

Despite that unchallenged evidence the prosecution gave the appearance of persisting in reliance upon the routing of the money as evidence of the defendants’ knowledge of the unlawful sources of the cash. In his closing speech Mr Sells said:-

“The money coming in is then transferred not into rupees to go back into Pakistan. Oh no. Into dollars. And the impression was given to you ‘oh we are dollar traders. We trade in dollars.’ As though there was any logic in that at all…If these people were genuinely sending money over to Pakistan, there was nothing to stop them sending rupees which could be collected in a few days.”

This reliance on a sinister aspect to the exchange of sterling into dollars was not, however, consistent. As Mr Sells points out in his argument in the application, the Crown stressed that the essential matter on which the jury should focus was not the route through which the money went once it left this country but where it came from. The jury needed to reach a conclusion as to the state of mind of the defendants when they received the money. Later, Mr Sells said:-

“You do not need to trouble yourselves we suggest, as indeed I said in opening, with the ultimate destination of these funds. It does not determine – the fact that these funds may have gone to all the various places that we have seen in that schedule…does not determine the question as to whether these men knew it was the proceeds of crime. What determines that question is where they thought it came from at the time. And that is the matter you should focus upon we suggest.”

In our view the prosecution should not have relied upon the exchange of sterling into dollars by the operation of corresponding United States bank accounts at all. That means of making available the sterling funds provided no basis for determining the state of the defendants’ mindsas to the source of the sterling funds. This the prosecution appeared to have accepted by the time it made its closing submissions. Reliance placed upon the exchange of sterling into dollars was merely a potential source of confusion for the jury. In argument before us Mr Sells contended that it was not the prosecution’s case that the jury could make any adverse inference from the route the money took once it had been transferred into the Watan Travel bank accounts in the United Kingdom and thence into corresponding accounts in the United States. It is hard to accept that submission in the light of the comments made by him in his opening submissions to the jury.

But the question is whether reliance upon that feature of the evidence renders the verdicts unsafe or contributes to their lack of safety in the context of the other grounds to which we shall subsequently turn. In our view it did not. The judge referred to the expert evidence of Mr Sillett during the course of his directions to the jury, reminded them that the money was routed via accounts in New York or Bahrain but continued:-

“I do not propose really to deal with it in any greater detail, because the prosecution do not say that there is any particular significance now in the routing of the money as being relevant to the particular question of knowledge.” (our emphasis)

Whilst the judge was charitable to the prosecution, which did not seem to us to be particularly clear, even in its closing submissions, he made it sufficiently plain to the jury that the route of the money was not a factor tending to suggest guilty knowledge. In those circumstances the inappropriate reliance upon that feature by the prosecution does not seem to us to be a basis for concluding that the verdicts were unsafe or to have misled the jury into reaching their adverse conclusions. Juries are trusted to follow the directions. In those circumstances we are unable to say that the route of the money might have misled the jury into concluding that the defendants knew that the source of the money was criminal activity. On the contrary the unnecessary and excessive reliance by the prosecution on this bad point can, in our view, only have assisted the defence. The defence was able successfully to establish that one of the planks of the prosecution case, namely the route the money took after it was transferred from the United Kingdom to the United States, was erroneous. The fact that the prosecution took a bad point which the defence was able to demolish and which led to the judge’s direction to the jury that the prosecution was no longer pursuing the point and that it should not adversely influence the jury, is not a ground upon which we can conclude that the verdict was unsafe. It merely strengthened the defence case to be able to show that a point deployed by the prosecution was bad.

Because we take the view that the prosecution did persist in taking a bad point, contrary to the submissions now advanced, we shall give leave to appeal on that point which again is difficult to identify by number but forms part of ground B and §§ 26-33 of the written advice.

The evidence as to the means by which funds were transmitted from the UK bank accounts into corresponding accounts in the United States led the defence to seek admission of a document which they called the Dubai Report. That report had not been disclosed in the trial but had been available to the defence in other linked cases and formed the basis of admissions made by the prosecution in a related trial. But the Crown declined to make the same admissions in the trial of these applicants.

The report purported to contain information obtained as a result of a request for legal assistance from the United Kingdom to the Dubai Public Prosecutor. In response to that request, on the instructions of the Dubai Public Prosecutor, a committee was set up from officials of the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates and the Dubai Police General Headquarters to produce a report on World Link Exchange. World Link Exchange had significance because Asif Memon was an executive director and a large amount of the money was transferred through its business.

The report stated that World Link Exchange LLC received funds from Watan Travel and two other companies:-

“…transferred (those funds) to the accounts of beneficiaries that were not ultimate recipients (Pakistani currency exchange establishments) as per the schedules set out earlier in this report.”

In the absence of any admission the defendants sought to adduce the statements contained within the report as evidence of their truth, pursuant to s.114(1)(d) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. On the same day as the application was made, 20 November 2006, the Crown persuaded the judge to hear an application in the absence of the defence on the grounds of public interest. The application lasted some 14 minutes.

At an ex-parte hearing before us, prior to the hearing of these applications, and in consequence of an earlier ruling of this court, differently constituted, we saw a transcript of that hearing and the documents which led to the Crown’s ex-parte application, made before the judge’s ruling in relation to the admission of what the defence called the Dubai Report. As a result of the hearing before us we made no further order for disclosure. After the ex-parte hearing on 20 November 2006 the judge heard further submissions from the defence which objected to the interposition of the ex-parte hearing.

In his ruling, given on the same day the judge identified the importance the defendants attached to what was said in relation to Watan Travel and in particular to a schedule which showed amounts of dollars totalling £306.6m. The schedule identified the specific amounts held in either the Bank of America or Marine Midland Bank at the disposal of named currency exchange houses in either Islamabad or Karachi. Those exchange houses included Khanani & Khalia and Soneri Exchange with which the named conspirator, G M Khan, was associated. The judge ruled that the Dubai Report should not be admitted because it:-

“…does not assist and may be misleading if it is given the interpretation which the defence seek to put upon it. In my judgement it has absolutely no probative value and in those circumstances I refuse to admit it.”

As the judge pointed out, the issue on which it was said that the evidence contained in that document cast light was said to be the destination or beneficiaries of the money identified within the report.

The basis upon which the judge said the Dubai Report did not assist was unclear from the judge’s ruling but appears to be contained in a paragraph which reads:-

“It is said that materials being put before me which ought not to have been because of the use of the expression in the form of words which is as follows ‘the Crown is in possession of material which does not fall to be disclosed’. I am satisfied that I have not seen any material which should not have been shown to me and I do not accept the proposition put forward by Mr Swift that I am not entitled to consider as part of this exercise anything else I might have seen.

In my judgement this section of the Dubai Report referred to in schedule 2 does not in fact permit the interpretation which is sought to be put upon it by the defence and it is in order to assist the defence in not going down that erroneous route that the form of words was put before them.” (our emphasis)

It is clear to us that the reason the judge refused to allow the defence to adduce the evidence contained in the report is that he had obtained other information, not available to the defence, which cast doubt upon the correctness of any factual proposition on which the defence sought to rely, derived from the document they had obtained. Mr Sells sought to argue that nothing had happened within the ex-parte hearing which formed the basis of the judge’s ruling. All that had been determined was the form of words he should use. We reject that submission. The wording of the judge’s ruling, cryptic as it is, makes it sufficiently plain that the judge was, indeed, relying upon material, to which the defence had been denied access, as the basis for concluding that he should not permit the defence to adduce before the jury which was misleading. Indeed, the words we have emphasised make it clear that the judge asserted the right to consider material he had seen in reaching his conclusion on admissibility.

The judge’s ruling demonstrates, to our mind, that he reached his conclusion by a seriously erroneous procedure.

The judge was required to rule upon the defence application pursuant to s.114. In order to determine whether it was in the interests of justice for the statements contained within that document to be admissible, he had to determine the circumstances in which the statement was made (s.114(2)(d)), how reliable the maker of the statement appeared to be (e), how reliable the evidence of the making of the statement appeared to be (f) and what other evidence could be given on the matter (g).

In order to reach a conclusion as to those matters both prosecution and defence were entitled to make submissions on the basis of any other material available to either. It was wrong and, contrary to Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, for the prosecution to have the advantage of relying upon material unavailable to the defence. A hearing on admissibility must be conducted on the basis that the material and arguments deployed, both for and against admissibility, are available to each party concerned in the admission of the evidence. It is unlikely that any authority should be needed for such elementary propositions of fairness.

Nevertheless there is no want of authority in support of these basic principles. In the case of Edwards & Lewis v The United Kingdom (23 July 2004 application nos 39647/98 and 40461/98) the European Court of Human Rights sitting as a Chamber determined that there was a violation of Article 6 § 1 in circumstances where the trial judge determined an issue of fact as to entrapment on the basis, in part, of undisclosed evidence. The court endorsed the propriety of ex-parte hearings for the purposes of claiming public interest immunity of the kind held in R v Davies, Johnson & Rowe [1993] WLR 1 613 but distinguished such cases from those where the undisclosed material formed part of the basis of the judge’s ruling (see §§ 57 and 58). It is important to note that the Government did not appeal the decision in Edwards to the Grand Chamber, no doubt, in part, because the decision of the House of Lords in R v H & C [2004] 2 Cr App R 10 p 179 was consistent with the ruling of the Fourth Section. The importance of R v H & C in the context of this application is that it overruled R v Smith (Joe) [2001] 2 Cr App R 1. In that case the judge had relied upon information communicated to him by the prosecution during a PII hearing as the basis for ruling that the police had had reasonable grounds for suspecting the defendant of burglary; thus the police were entitled to rely upon DNA evidence derived from a non-intimate sample. The Court of Appeal had endorsed that approach. The House of Lords in H & C concluded that that was wrong because the main plank of the defence had been destroyed by evidence given to the judge privately which the defence never had the opportunity to meet (see § 42).

Similarly in the instant appeal the judge was not entitled to make a ruling as to admissibility which in any way relied upon material he had been shown or arguments advanced in the course of a PII hearing conducted in the absence of the defence. The defence had had no opportunity to meet the prosecution’s objections as to the reliability of what was called the Dubai Report because they never saw that which formed the foundation of the prosecution’s objection.

But we have to consider the impact of what we regard as a serious irregularity on the safety of the verdict. As the judge correctly recognised, one of the issues which the judge had to determine was the probative value of the statement contained in the report (assuming it to be true) (see s.114(2)(a)). The material on which the defence relied merely established that sterling deposited with Watan Travel had been placed at the disposal of Pakistani exchange houses in the form of US dollars. Such a proposition did not begin to meet the prosecution’s case that the defendants knew that the source of the sterling was criminal activity. The defence could do no more than say they had no idea of the source of that sterling but merely trusted those who had collected it.

Thus, as the prosecution had stated in its closing submissions, to establish what had happened to the sterling once it had been exchanged for dollars provided no assistance as to the state of mind of the defendants when they received the sterling cash before it had been placed in Watan Travel’s bank accounts and exchanged. The judge, therefore, would have had ample basis for excluding the evidence on bases which did not rely in any way on material not disclosed to the defence. The statement, in reality, had no probative value, quite apart from the fact that the defence was unable to show the circumstances in which it was made or how reliable the maker of the statement was or the evidence of the making of the statement appeared to be. Many of the issues which s.114(2) identifies would have formed a proper foundation for rejection of the defence application. We should stress that we fully understand how the judge came to make the error into which he was led by the prosecution. If we may say so, he handled the vast bulk of the case with masterful control and it was by no means easy for him to disentangle the claim for PII, which we have upheld, and the ruling he was being required to make on admissibility. But it was necessary to disentangle the two and scrupulously to avoid any reference to that which was not available to the defence as a basis for a ruling on admissibility. We shall give permission to appeal on this ground, which appears to be ground A, but for the reasons we have given, reject the appeal on that ground.

That is sufficient to dispose of the appeal in relation to Liaquat Ali. But the cogency and force of the submissions advanced on his behalf by Mr Clegg QC were matched by further submissions advanced by Mr Lakha QC on behalf of Mr Hussain. He supported those submissions but reinforced the arguments as to the unfairness of the prosecution by identifying a number of respects in which, he said, the prosecution unfairly deprived Mr Hussain of the opportunity fully to deploy his defence. Mr Hussain sought to explain the very substantial deposits of cash which form the subject matter of counts 1 and 2 as being the product of what a witness, Tahir Nawaz, called wholesale Halawa. By this he meant that the sums could be explained as an accumulation by others who had collected and grouped deposits together. As Mr Clegg QC conceded, Mr Nawaz proved a disastrous witness.

Mr Hussain’s case was that he trusted G M Khan and Asif Memon and the exchange houses with which they were concerned. He did not purport to know the identity of those who had originally raised the cash, still less by what means it had been raised. In those circumstances, whether Watan Travel was acting as Halawadar, receiving deposit money directly from individuals, or transmitting money on behalf of intermediaries who had accumulated cash, made little difference. The greater the distance of Watan Travel and the defendants from the original depositors, the more difficult it was for them to identify the source of the money or how it had been raised. The cross-examination of Mr Hussain served to underline that no steps had been taken by the defendants to ascertain the identity of those who had made the original deposits for the purposes of onward transmission or from what trade the sums had been derived.

Mr Lakha complained that the prosecution failed to inform themselves as to the system of Halawa banking and the manner in which money was accumulated by intermediaries before it ever reached Watan Travel. In support of that submission he complained that the prosecution failed to adduce evidence from a financial intelligence officer with the Serious Organised Crime Agency, Mr Lowe, who they contend could have confirmed that there existed wholesalers with whom an accumulation of small sums was deposited, and that those wholesalers would be responsible for transmitting the money. Analysis of his statement, which we have read, shows that it would not have assisted the defence had the prosecution been aware of and disclosed that statement since whilst Mr Lowe does refer to such business, he accuses such wholesalers of laundering the financial profits from drug-trafficking.

The more Mr Lakha stresses what he describes as the lawful proportion of the applicant’s trade, the more he exposes the significance of the deposits of hundreds of thousands of pounds at a time in relation to the cash which forms the subject matter of counts 1 and 2. As the schedules demonstrated, this was on a far greater scale than the cash deposits which went to make up the balance of £120m. At least those sums identified the beneficiaries. But on one occasion in a single day Watan Travel took delivery of £3.3m. Mr Hussain in cross-examination was compelled to accept that he had no knowledge of the source of such a vast amount of cash, still less an explanation as to why vast quantities of the cash was deposited in Scottish and Northern Irish notes. The jury was entitled to take the view that both he and his co-applicant were aware that his legitimate trade would afford a front for money obtained as a result of criminal activity and that there could have been no other explanation for such vast sums being deposited in cash. There was no dispute between defence and prosecution that the defendants had taken no steps to identify the trade from which the money was derived or any steps to ascertain its legitimacy. In those circumstances the jury was entitled to infer knowledge that it came from criminal activity. Indeed it is difficult to see what other explanation there could have been for the receipt of such massive individual cash deposits without any attempt to verify the legitimacy of their source.

In those circumstances it does not seem to us to avail either applicant to assert the lawfulness of a proportion of their business. There is no point in money laundering unless it be through the medium of a legitimate business. These applicants sought to give an explanation as to why they remained ignorant of the true source of those deposits. They asserted that their business depended on trust. The jury was entitled to reject that explanation. The conduct of the prosecution in failing to admit the legitimacy of any of the trade whilst seeking to prove the criminality of a substantial proportion was correct. The defendants have no one but themselves to blame for the jury’s adverse conclusion, reached only after a short period of deliberation of three and a half hours. They had resolutely failed to comply with Regulations designed to afford protection, not just to the public, but also to those dealing with the transmission of cash. They had failed to make any enquiries whatever. The complaints they now make do not affect the safety of the verdicts. We dismiss the applications and, in respect of those grounds in respect of which we have given permission to appeal, we dismiss the appeals.

Both applicants were sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment concurrent on the two counts of conspiracy. They now raise one ground of appeal relating to the delay which has ensued as a result of their first successful appeal and the retrial. The events which were the subject matter of these appeals took place between 1997 and 2001. The mis-directions at the first trial have led to a substantial delay. We feel that delay, occasioned through no fault of the applicants, save in so far as they contested the charges, should be reflected by a reduction of sentence. There is ample authority for making such a deduction on those grounds (see, e.g., Mills v HM Advocate & Anr [2002] 3 WLR 1597 and R v Petkar Farquhar [2004] 1 Cr App R 22). We shall grant permission to both applicants and allow their appeals by reducing the sentence of twelve years to one of ten, a period of two years to reflect the substantial delay.