Case No. EWCA-Crim-2366

Crim the Court upheld sentences of 15 and 14 years for appellants who had had an organising role in an MTIC fraud. The court noted the distinction between the sentencing regimes applicable to common law cheating and statutory fraud and observed at para 38: “There are no sentencing guidelines applicable to this case. The guidelines for statutory offences of fraud (carrying a maximum of 10 years’ imprisonment) do not extend to offences of cheating, or conspiring to cheat, the public revenue, for which the penalty is at large. Such offences are reserved for the most serious cases, where a sentence in excess of the statutory maximum for other offences may be appropriate.” 28.Miss Montgomery suggested that the effect of these and other similar observations (for example in the Sentencing Guidelines Council’s Definitive Guideline on Fraud) would mean that a serious case of cheating the public revenue is necessarily more serious than the most serious case of statutory fraud or conspiracy to defraud. Upholding a 15 year sentence in a case of conspiracy to cheat is tantamount to saying that an offender’s conduct is so serious that it calls for a 50% longer sentence than any conceivable case of fraud. She posed the rhetorical question: surely