In this case study, the Police found £100,000 of cash in the boot of the Defendant’s car when he was stopped for a motoring infringement. He claimed that this cash was business related having been generated from his supermarket businesses and not from any illegal activities. However the cash was seized pending further enquiries. There were further allegations that certain items (alcohol and cigarettes) had been sold without the proper duty having been paid on them and had been imported illegally. Marc Clifton, Frenkels Forensics, explains how we helped.
The Defendant’s solicitors contacted us to write a report that would demonstrate that the cash had indeed been generated from the Defendant’s supermarket businesses as well as clarifying the products that had been queried as to the legality of their source.
We firstly ascertained from the till records that it was possible to split the takings between cash and card as well as the product description. Using advanced data handling techniques we identified, extracted and analysed the 100,000’s of till records and compared them to other financial material, such as bank statements, purchase invoices and staff wage records. We were thus able to establish that a large amount of turnover involved receipts in cash.
We then traced all of the takings whether received in cash or card back to the bank statements for a 9 month period prior to the date that the cash was seized. The analysis involved hundreds of thousands of individual product sales transactions. Our analysis showed that large amounts of cash generated at the tills were not banked. Instead we were able to show, by checking the purchase and wages records against what had been paid out from the bank account, that cash not banked had been used to fund wages and purchases.
Frenkels Forensics concluded that, given the large amount of cash generated each week, the cash seized was likely to represent the cash sales taken at the tills but not banked. We were also able to show that all sales made had been generated from products that had a barcode that related to a legitimate item that could be traced back to legitimate purchase invoices, and which had been legitimately sourced.
As a result of our report the cash seized is due to be returned to the Defendant.