A swindler, who used 130 fake identities to carry out a fraud worth £1.1 million, was put behind bars on Monday to serve a sentence of five-and-a-half years.
Kanagaratnam Ganan aged 33, had an appalling set of bogus documents, including 129 fake Indian passports, one false Sri Lankan passport along with phony service bills, at his residence in Croydon, Surrey. He had around 500 accounts, out of which 200 belonged to Barclays and 85 were got through NatWest, and as many as 120 credit and debit cards. Two fake Home Office rubber stamps were also found in the laundry basket along with rest of the documents.
Having established his credibility with the bank through fake utility bills and the necessary documents, Ganan applied for loans, overdrafts and credit cards and left banks to run after a ‘fake’ person for bills, thereby collecting £1.1 million debt.
Besides, it was heard in the Guildford Crown Court that Ganan had also employed a complicated network of 112 mail redirection schemes and rented post boxes to conduct his fraudulent moves impeccably. He had pled guilty in the beginning of the year to conspiracy to defraud.
Ganan’s accomplices, Jeyaseelan Rajaratnam, aged 32, and Tharmalingam Gnanachchandran, aged 33 were also convicted for the scam. While Rajaratnam from Sutton was granted a two-year imprisonment for being a part of the conspiracy in fraud, Gnanachchandran of Liverpool was sentenced for year in jail for committing money laundering crimes.
The prosecutor, Stephen John, said, “Ganan was head and shoulders above the others. He orchestrated what must have been close to a full-time employment to defraud clearing banks over a period of five years. There were a myriad of false or forged documents including high quality forged passports.”
He added that though Ganan was a Sri Lankan-born person residing in Britain, he had pretended to be a single and employed man from India who had just come to the UK and was putting up in a house on rent.
John told the court that Ganan “operated in a manner which gives rise to no suspicions, giving the banks and building societies the impression that this is an ordinary hard-working customer in receipt of a regular income.”
However, Ganan’s defender, Daniel Coleman, asserted that his client (Ganan) was not involved in the “high life”, although he had invested a lot of the money in “poor investments”.
The presiding judge, Michael Addison announced sentences for all the three and told Ganan, “You clearly were the ringleader, you were orchestrating this operation and you recruited the others to assist you. I am also satisfied that you were the main beneficiary.” He also told Rajaratnam that he would also be considered a party to Ganan’s crime since he had rented out a room in his house to Ganan.
Posted
on : Tue, 11 Oct 2005 20:20 GMT | General News
By : Rob Davis
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