Garrick Law acts for the first defendant dubbed the KingPin in a 38 Million pound international Shuttle trading conspiracy.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12064115/Three-women-gang-16-people-traffickers-snuck-42M-drug-cash-Dubai.html

The Case

The case involved multiple defendants all alleged to have played respective parts in a shuttle trading fraud. The prosecution alleged that documentation, ledgers attributed to the defendants, coupled with proof of international travel, to and from Dubai, proved the alleged conspiracy.

Expert evidence and telephonic evidence relied upon by the prosecution to substantiate the allegations, was challenged by the defence. Garrick Law instructed Sedulo Forensic Accountants.

What Is Shuttle Trading

Shuttle trading also known as the ‘suitcase trade’ dates back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, which led to a collapse of Central Asian and Caucasian states and the emergence of a widespread informal economy centred on the bazaar.

Informal bazaar economies involved the movement of goods and people transnationally across borders, where goods were sold in emergent bazaars.

The client relied on the defence of Hawala.

The shuttle trade is indirectly connected to hawala via the bazaar economy in which hawala or IVTS facilitates trade and commerce. For example, historically businesses in the middle east, primarily but not exclusively SMEs, which had been the backbone of the informal economy, used or would use exchange houses for currency exchange, money transfers and short-term financing.3

In the UAE, hawala is regulated by the Regulation on Registered Hawala Providers which requires hawala providers to register with the UAE Central Bank to obtain a Hawala Provider Certificate Hawala providers are required to adhere to UAE federal laws on anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing.

In recent decades, Dubai has become a global offshore financial centre and trading hub.

Dubai’s communications, financial, and trading linkages with the global economy have led some observers to characterise it as the ‘lynch-pin of the contemporary global hawala system’.37

Although hawala or hawala like banking systems are globally active, Dubai’s history as a destination for large numbers of South Asian labour migrants in the early 1970s and their desire to remit savings back home created the conditions in which Dubai has become a hub for hawala transactions. Moreover, exchange and capital controls in India and Pakistan fostered a gulf between official exchange rates and black market rates which incentivised hawaladars to develop settlement and distribution networks for accepting hard currencies (dinars, dirhems, dollars) and paying out rupees in India and Pakistan at competitive rates.

Garrick Law instructed Richard Wormwold KC of 3 Raymond Buildings and Molly Dyas of 2 Bedford Row.