A fraudster has been jailed for helping to scam medical companies out of millions of pounds through bogus personal protective equipment (PPE) deals during the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
Craig Morris, 43, and Jogesh Bhandari, 60, bought luxury cars, holidays and a new home after pretending they could supply millions of boxes of nitrile gloves in the US and Germany. <\/p>\n
They were convicted of two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation as well as concealing and transferring criminal property at Leicester Crown Court in July.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Morris received three years and nine months in prison. Jogesh, of Mitchell Drive, Loughborough, Leicestershire, will be sentenced later.<\/p>\n
Jogesh told his counsel he was taking a “very extreme painkiller” after having a pacemaker fitted last week and was not able to travel to Northampton, where the sentencing hearing took place.<\/p>\n
His wife, former pharmacist Meenakashi Bhandari, 58, also of Mitchell Drive, did attend the sentencing hearing.<\/p>\n
She was found guilty of concealing and transferring criminal property. She was given a two-year prison sentence, suspended for two years, 250 hours of unpaid work and 15 days of rehabilitation activity.<\/p>\n
Judge William Harbage KC said there was “no medical evidence” to properly explain Jogesh’s absence and said a bench warrant would be issued. He is expected to be sentenced on 16 October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A fraudster has been jailed for helping to scam medical companies out of millions of pounds through bogus…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":795227,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-795226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/795227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}