Dao, R v

MR JUSTICE OPENSHAW: On 6th September 2007, at the Crown Court at Southwark, the appellant, Vu Dao, pleaded guilty to a charge of entering or becoming concerned in a money laundering arrangement contrary to section 329 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. On 29th October he was sentenced by His Honour Judge Stone QC to three and a half years' imprisonment. The judge ordered that the whole of the time which he had spent in custody on remand should count towards the sentence.

He now appeals against that sentence by leave of the single judge.

The facts are as follows. The appellant is a Vietnamese, now aged 26. On 20th January 2006 a police surveillance team observed him entering a bank with another Vietnamese as yet untraced. He withdrew £10,000 from his account and was arrested as he left the bank. The appellant's home was searched. It was obvious that he was living well beyond his legitimate earnings as a bus driver. £9,000 in cash was found in a shoe box. Papers relating to eight different bank accounts were found. An analysis of these showed that between 2003 and 2006 he had paid just over £200,000 into these accounts and withdrawn the deposits either the same day or very shortly thereafter. Other documents revealed that the appellant had purchased a house in Carlisle for £62,000 with a cheque drawn on one of the accounts. He had rented the house to a friend of his uncle's. Further investigations showed that the premises had been converted to enable the cultivation of cannabis by a hydroponic system of the familiar kind.

The appellant was interviewed on three separate occasions. In the first two interviews he made no comment. In the third he provided what can only be described as vague, incredible and unsatisfactory answers to the important questions and denied the allegations which were then put to him. He claimed that a lot of money had passed through his account that belonged to friends and relatives, but he claimed not to know where it had come from. He added that he did not see what was wrong with putting money into an account and withdrawing it again, and that money within the Vietnamese community tended to move around a lot on trust. He added that he had no idea where the money for many of the foreign transactions that went into his account had come from. He had no previous convictions.

The judge in his sentencing remarks said that the appellant had pleaded guilty to money laundering on a very large scale over a three year period which came from the unlawful cultivation of cannabis and he sentenced him to three year and a half years as we have said.

It is argued on his behalf that the sentence was manifestly excessive. It is said that the judge gave insufficient weight to his good character, to his early plea of guilty, to the low claim that the appellant had on valuable prison places. It is said that the appellant was used by others. This may be so, but he was far removed from the simple farmers who operate these cannabis factories. It is said that the sentence was out of line with the three year sentence passed after a trial upon his uncle by another judge at another court on another indictment for other offences of conspiring to cultivate cannabis. The facts of these two cases, it seems to us, are so dissimilar that there cannot sensibly be any argument put forward on the basis of an objectionable or unfair disparity. We do not find any of these points very persuasive.

Finally, it is urged that the sentence was out of line with the sentences passed in similar cases. There is no guideline case on money laundering, and perhaps the circumstances vary so widely that general guidance cannot be given. The cases to which Mr Mohabir has referred us are, therefore, not so much authorities as examples of sentences passed or upheld in other cases, but the facts are necessarily somewhat different. This was money laundering to the tune of £200,000-odd over a number of years. But the cases do seem to suggest that the bracket for this extent of money laundering after a timely plea is somewhere in the region of two to three years.

In our judgment, three and a half years is beyond the top of the bracket to the extent that we should intervene. We therefore quash the three and half year sentence and substitute a sentence of two and a half years. To that extent the appeal is allowed.