Insolvency Practitioner Involved in £5 Million Fraud Sentenced to Over 3 Years in Prison

An insolvency practitioner named Kiran Kumar Mistry has been sentenced to three years and six months in prison for his role in defrauding a total of nine different companies based in the Midlands.

David Wright, a defendant in the same case, was handed an 18 month sentence that was suspended for two years and given a community punishment order for his involvement in the same series of fraudulent endeavours.

Both men were sentenced at the end of January, with the Insolvency Service revealing that the two men and their co-conspirators had been under investigation under the code name Operation Barber for a period of 10 years.

The court hearing the case was told that investigators had found evidence that Mr Mistry had acted improperly as an insolvency practitioner assigned to the affairs of eight of the nine companies cited as being involved in fraud on a very sizable scale.

It was established that Mr Mistry’s actions with regard to these companies were designed to enable a co-conspirator named Demitris Bains to defraud creditors consistently between 1998 and July 2007.

The recently concluded court case was the second to result from the findings of Operation Barber, with seven other defendants having been sentenced to a collective total of 17 years in prison in the first, which took place in 2014.

Mr Bains was deemed by the judge in the recent court case to have been the ringleader of what have now been shown to be very extensive fraudulent activities in which Mr Mistry played his part as an insolvency practitioner.

In all, the defrauding of nine Midlands companies in the case is believed to have been worth £5 million to the numerous conspirators involved, with Bains understood to have been the principal beneficiary.  

“The insolvency regime relies entirely on the professionals within it being honest,” said Glenn Wicks, who led the Operation Barber investigation.

“Kiran Mistry was a qualified and licensed insolvency practitioner who has been proved to be corrupt and a shame to his profession.

“Rather than reporting criminality as he was legally bound to do, he was actually involved in committing the frauds and then covering them up.”