Post by Sapphire Capital on Jul 14, 2008 20:59:27 GMT 4
Anne Darwin: Simple plot but complex fraud
THE disappearance plot was described as "simple" but the five-and-a-half-year fraud which followed involved "a complex web of transactions".
Prosecutor Andrew Robertson, QC, talked the jury through the 15 charges Anne Darwin faces - six of fraud and nine labelled "money laundering".
The fraud counts involve the couple dishonestly obtaining pension and insurance pay-outs by claiming John Darwin had died at sea in his canoe.
The money laundering charges revolve around converting the cash into premium bonds and using some of it to pay off existing debts.
Mr Robertson said: "You will see in due course how she and her husband wove a complex web of transactions between various bank accounts, making the funds all the more difficult to trace, before finally putting them beyond the jurisdiction of our courts in that foreign land."
The jury heard that the couple obtained more than £250,000, but the figure rose to more than half-a-million pounds with the sale of their properties, which they would have lost had they not received the pay-outs.
By the time the fraud was uncovered following Mr Darwin's re-emergence in December last year, the funds had been transferred to Panama and invested in land and property.
Some of the money, Mr Robertson told the jury, was in foreign bank accounts in Mrs Darwin's name.
The court was told that none of the illegal transactions or false claims are disputed by Mrs Darwin, but she claims she was forced to carry out the fraud by her husband.
"The scheme, in its form, was a simple one," Mr Robertson said. "John Darwin to stage his disappearance, his apparent death, and Anne Darwin to claim the insurance and pension monies under various policies they had taken out.
"Simple though the scheme was, it was obviously going to require a considerable amount of guile, convincing pretence and persistence and guts on the part of Anne Darwin to see it through.
"Her role was the positive one - John Darwin, after supposedly disappearing, had to keep his head down so that the falsity of his disappearance would not be rumbled."