Man guilty of money laundering
A MAN has been jailed for money laundering after hiding more than �250,000 in a safety deposit box in Hampstead.
Daniel Sullivan, 50, pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation and concealing criminal property and was sentenced to a total of two years and eight months in prison at Southwark Crown Court.
Sullivan opened a safety deposit box in a false name at the Hampstead Safe Depository in Finchley Road in 2004 and kept �254,800 there until a Metropolitan Police investigation into the use of safety deposit boxes for crime.
Enquiries revealed that Sullivan lived a “luxurious” lifestyle, living in a flat worth �325,000, driving a 4x4 VW Touareg worth �19,000 and taking expensive holidays to destinations including Thailand.
Officers also discovered that Sullivan had applied for a mortgage at a high street bank using a false employment history and a false accountant’s reference.
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While being interviewed, he told police that he was hiding the money for an acquaintance who ran an unlicensed bookmakers business.
Sullivan, of Forest View in Chingford, Essex, admitted to transporting cash to and from associates involved in unlicensed bookmaking and gambling and accepted that the money found in the safety deposit box was money that his employer should have paid to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
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Detective Constable Chris Andrews said: “Sullivan was stopped in his tracks and we have no doubt that he would have continued along this criminal path had he not been caught. We will now be looking to secure a confiscation order against him under the Proceeds of Crime Act to strip him of his criminally tainted assets and cash.”
The three bosses of the Hampstead Safe Depository are charged with a string of offences and are due to stand trial in January.
Golders Green resident Milton Woolf, 53, a director of Safe Deposit Centres Limited, has been charged with 36 offences including possessing a prohibited firearm, intending to pervert the course of justice, control of counterfeit money and possessing false documents.
His fellow director Jacqueline Swan, 45, from Barnet, has been charged with 11 offences including two counts of concealing criminal property. A former director of the firm, Leslie Sief, 64, of Ranulf Road in West Hampstead, is charged with one count of having custody or control of a counterfeit currency note with intent.
