FIVE PEOPLE – including an Irish actress, whose uncle is a Sinn Féin MP – have been jailed in Britain for pretending to make a Hollywood movie in a scam to defraud tax authorities of millions of pounds.
Actress Aoife Madden (31), a niece of Newry MP Conor Murphy with an address in west London, was among the five who were given prison sentences for trying to claim major tax breaks and incentives for shooting a Hollywood-style film in the UK.
The fraudsters had been convicted earlier this month of attempting to secure a total of £2.8 million (€3.3 million) in government tax breaks and reliefs for work that had never been done.
Prosecutors said the group claimed to be producing a made-in-Britain movie with unnamed A-list actors and a budget of £19 million, financed by backers in Jordan – even convincing ‘Loose Women’ host Andrea McLean to take a major acting role.
But officials say the project was a sham to claim almost £1.5 million in goods and services tax for work that had not been done, as well as £1.3 million pounds under a government program that allows film-makers to claim back up to 25 percent of their expenditures as tax relief.
Only seven minutes of footage was actually shot for the film, which authorities said was ‘completely unusable’.
Bashar Al-Issa, described as the leader of the fraud, was jailed for six and a half years yesterday. Madden was jailed for four years and eight months. Three others in the group were sentenced to about four years each.
Britain’s tax agency said the filmmakers had submitted paperwork and received £1.7 million pounds when research revealed “that the work had not been done and most of the so-called suppliers and film studios had never heard of the gang.”
When the scam was detected, the gang hastily made a film called ‘A Landscape Of Lies’ on a shoestring budget in a bid to cover it up.
The movie – dealing with a former soldier’s struggles to readjust to civilian life after the Gulf War, when his former commanding officer is killed in a mugging – was released straight to DVD in Britain in 2011. But that did not deter tax authorities.
Judge Juliet May said innocent actors were roped into the bogus project, never suspecting they were used to create a “realistic background” for the fraud.
Additional reporting by AP
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