A Metropolitan Police prosecution has resulted in a sentence of three years and four months for a 79-year-old-man at the heart of a racket to steal construction and agricultural plant and then ship to it to waiting customers in the United Arab Emirates.
Ali Ghasemi of Harrow, north London, was sentenced last week following a conviction for his part in a conspiracy dating back to 2008. He was assisted by several members of the Sayed family, to whom he is a family friend, who have also been convicted and sentenced.
The operation was investigated by the Plant and Agricultural National Intelligence Unit (PANIU), a specialist police unit funded by the construction and agricultural insurance industries, including the Construction Equipment Association.
Between 2008 and 2010, Ghasemi booked a freight company to supply shipping containers to remote locations across south-east England. Unbeknown to the freight company, at least 48 stolen JCBs, rollers, telehandlers, forklifts and tractors – many of them worth around £50,000 each – were loaded into the containers.
Police found a telehandler in a shipping container in Somerset
It is thought they were then stored in remote rural locations until being shipped out to a company called Al Mustaqeem, in Sharjah, UAE, in which Ghasemi was found to be an investor. The group sold the machinery on to clients in the UAE, where there was a huge demand for plant machinery at the time.
Officers from the PANIU began investigating the group in July 2009 after Avon and Somerset Police recovered two telehandlers in a shipping container from a remote farm in Wedmore, Somerset. Enquiries with the freight company revealed a large amount of shipping requests from the family.
Subsequent warrants executed with Hertfordshire and Thames Valley Police Services resulted in numerous other pieces of plant and equipment being recovered across south England.
Between August and September 2009, officers arrested all the members of the group and search warrants were executed at their home addresses. There they found records of the stolen vehicles’ identification numbers, accounts books with various family members’ names shown next to payments made and received, and photographs of the stolen equipment.
Investigating officer, DC James Elliott of the PANIU, said: “The demand for high value plant machinery in the UAE was sky-high and Ghasemi and the Sayed family sought to make money from that with criminal methods.
“We believe that the vehicles had been stolen to order for clients in the UAE. Ghasemi and Sayed facilitated their export so that they could be sold on.
“A financial investigation to establish how much they made from their criminal enterprise is ongoing. Documentation we seized indicates that hundreds of thousands of pounds has passed through the family’s accounts over the course of the conspiracy.”
The PANIU aims to reduce plant theft across the UK by working with other police teams to help identify stolen equipment and tackle the organised criminal networks responsible for targeting plant equipment.
It also maintains a national theft database to provide police throughout the UK with information and intelligence to help them tackle plant machinery theft.
