He had won business awards, built a property portfolio and lived in a large house. He had also pleaded guilty to laundering over a million pounds in criminal cash. When the courts came to take it back, he did everything he could think of to make himself look penniless.

He liquidated his company - and quietly ran a near-identical one with almost the same name. He sold off assets and pocketed the proceeds personally. He moved money through his wife's account. He signed a house worth a quarter of a million pounds over to his daughters. Investigators followed all of it, and eventually he and his wife were both in the dock.

Also in this episode: a seventeen-year-old training to be a chef who was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer, and the charity that gave her family a place to stay near the hospital while she went through six rounds of chemotherapy; a student caught out by national data matching after failing to mention several bank accounts; and a shift with the DVLA's number plate recognition teams.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Taking the profit out of crime
01:58 Businessman of the Year, and a million pounds of dirty cash
09:36 Seventeen, a trainee chef, and a bone cancer diagnosis
25:48 The student who forgot to mention her bank accounts
32:11 On patrol with the DVLA number plate cameras
37:16 The house he signed over, and the trial that followed

Saints and Scroungers follows the fraud investigators, council teams and HMRC officers tracking down the people stealing from the public purse - and meets the people who genuinely need that money, and the charities fighting to get it to them.


Saints and Scroungers, Series 6 Episode 9. Originally broadcast on BBC One.

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