Revenue & Customs had to review 4,000 smuggling cases

An urgent review has begun of 4,000 cases in which the wrong legislation was used to confiscate cash and assets from people convicted of tobacco smuggling.
More than £88 million has been seized from people found guilty of counterfeiting tobacco brands since 2005. But an appeal by one man, William Chambers, revealed that Customs officers and prosecutors obtained a confiscation order against him under 1992 excise duty regulations, amended in 2001 to exclude tobacco products.
The case forced the Revenue & Customs Prosecution Office (RCPO) to track back through 4,000 case files. Dozens of similar errors have been unearthed, with many more files still to be examined. The RCPO faces repaying millions and being sued by people who had to sell their homes to meet the confiscation demands.
Among those appealing is John Rowbotham, who was arrested in 2003 in possession of two million contraband cigarettes and stopped a year later on the M6 driving a van containing 420,000 cigarettes for which no duty had been paid.Rowbotham was jailed for two years in 2004 and a confiscation order of £249,252 was imposed on him with three years’ jail in default of payment. He had an appeal dismissed in 2006 but applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission for a further appeal after being informed of the Chambers Review. The commission said: “There is a real possibility that the Court of Appeal will quash the confiscation order.”
The issue goes to the heart of a key legal concern over confiscation proceedings which are said to punish people twice for the same offence. Rowbotham, for example, was jailed and then faced a confiscation order which threatened further imprisonment if he did not pay up.
In a statement on its website, the RCPO says: “For a period of some time textbook authors, HM Revenue & Customs investigators, solicitors, counsel and courts had not appreciated that the regulations no longer applied to tobacco products.”