Whilst many people have been preoccupied with matters such as Brexit and the woefully inept way that this country is managed, another monstrous management and organisational culture failure has started to crawl into the light. This is the case of the mostly Muslim fraudsters who since the early to mid nineties had engaged in a massive fraud against the taxpayer other via the welfare system and the taxation system.
What is concerning about this case apart from the outrageous loss of money, £8 billion in estimated total, but also the allegation that at least £80M of the fraudulently obtained funds could have ended up in the hands of Al Qaida. Even worse are the allegations made in the Sunday Times and Daily Mail newspapers that senior officials in what was then HM Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue, could have acted more effectively but did not. The Mail said that HMCE senior management refused pleas by HMCE intelligence officers to prosecute cases against some of these Muslim fraudsters on the grounds that the agency lacked resources and the cases were complex.
Even when it should have been becoming clear that Islamic terrorism is a clear and present danger, in the immediate post 9/11 period, HMCE (now HM Revenue and Customs since the merger between HMCE and Inland Revenue in 2005), could not get their act together. Clinging to niceties regarding confidentiality, the Customs agency refused to disclose details of these frauds or those allegedly involved in them or the terrorist connection to the Security Service MI5.
The Daily Mail, in part quoting from a Sunday Times article said:
For years HMRC and other agencies did little to disrupt the network, taking almost no formal enforcement action. The files show that at least four rank-and-file HMRC intelligence officers implored their bosses to launch prosecutions. Their requests were rejected ‘due to their complicated nature and a lack of resources’.
When the 9/11 attacks occurred in 2001, one official warned HMRC chiefs that he had ‘basic information’ that would be of great interest to MI5.
Internal files seen by The Sunday Times show the officer said he was ‘ready to meet someone from the intelligence services’ with the ‘mountains of information available to us’ that had ‘taken on a whole new significance’ after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
‘Officers and, increasingly, their direct management have become frustrated at the lack of action,’ wrote the officer. His request was refused because HMRC was worried about preserving the taxpayer confidentiality of the terror suspects.
The scale of these frauds are massive. The amount of money that is said to have been defrauded from the taxpayer via VAT fraud, tax fraud, mortgage fraud and welfare fraud is sufficient to build two Queen Elizabeth II class aircraft carriers at £3.7billion each. This is a monumental dropped bollock by Britain’s tax and customs system. The implications of these frauds and the failure to properly deal with them are wide ranging. This is because of where at least some of the money gained by the fraudsters allegedly went. It is claimed that money from the fraud was donated to a number of different causes and organisations including the Labour Party and to various think tanks In addition to transferring money to terrorists and to potentially corrupt our government and administrative systems, the Mail revealed that some of the gang members were associates of one of the 7/7 bombers who killed fifty on London’s transport system in 2005. The report also mentions Abu Hamza, the hook handed Imam of the Finsbury Park mosque in North London as being instrumental in at least some of the frauds. He is said to have recruited young Muslims to work for a fraud syndicate. There are also allegations that little was done to prevent infiltration by these Muslim fraud gangs to government systems and agencies. For example, Post Offices are alleged by the Mail to have been co-opted by the fraudsters in order to give legitimacy to false documentation.
As I said earlier this fraud is huge, so huge that some may believe that this to be some form of financial jihad. I can see why people may think so as the sums defrauded are damagingly massive and the destinations of some of the funds were plainly aimed to advance Islam and advance Islam via terrorism. The allegations of infiltration of government agencies and donations to unnamed ‘think tanks’ and to the Labour Party must surely now make this a political matter rather than just a law enforcement and revenue one?
I’m pleased to see that some MP’s are disturbed by this and the Chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, Meg Hillier is going to be asking questions of the Cabinet Secretary about this and may order a Parliamentary Inquiry into these frauds. Personally I feel that there is no ‘may’ about it, there must be some sort of inquiry into these frauds. Such an inquiry should also delve into the use to which the defrauded funds have been put and how deeply have our public sector organisations been infiltrated and compromised by the associates of these fraudsters?
