British court sentences Pakistani woman for laundering ‘largest sum’ in recent years

A Pakistani woman on Tuesday was sentenced to four and a half years of prison on accounts of money laundering and vandalizing.

Kingston Crown Court also sentenced Razwana Zeib’s husband Rafaqat Hussain and three others for similar charges.

The 35-year-old mother of four children has been jailed for conspiring to GBP7 million cash-in-transit from Heathrow Airport.

The sum involved was one of the largest in recent years, the judge observed.

“This was a sophisticated operation which involved meticulous planning and execution,” Judge Stephen John said.

She was jailed after travelling to Pakistan and setting up a bank account with the intention of laundering at least GBP0.9 million of the total amount that her spouse had helped steal.

Hussain was jailed in October for conspiring to steal after he helped two security guards use his van to take 26 bags of cash belonging to Credit Suisse, from inside a British Airways cargo depot at the airport.

Judge John told Zeib that while she may not have known about the fake heist, she was aware that the money she was dealing with was the product of a crime.

“You accept that you were not coerced. You were a willing participant, you were in it for financial gain and you were not a naïve and unassuming wife,” the judge added.

On March 14, two Loomis employees, Mohammad Siddique and Ranjeev Singh, staged the fake heist under the guidance of Hussain. The two guards made it appear that they were victims; Siddique stopped the van to allow Singh a toilet break, who waited sometime before reporting the van missing.

Siddique drove away at speed, before later being found bound by cables on a service road near the M40 in Buckinghamshire, with the vehicle abandoned and the cash missing.

Hussain, 41, then conspired to launder the money with Zeib, 35, both of Chadwick Road, Slough.

Secret recordings made by a device planted by the police in Hussain’s car caught Zeib discussing with her husband the amount of stolen cash to be paid to a co-conspirator, the court heard.

Prosecutor Sandip Patel QC said that the police probe shows that Zeib had a “prominent role” in these discussions.

She was jailed for three-and-a-half years for conspiracy to money laundering and another year for conspiracy to commit burglary, having previously admitted to both counts.

The second charge was related to planning to ransack a house, that Zeib and her husband wanted to buy with their share of the loot, in an attempt to bring down the property’s price.

An 88-year-old woman was selling the house to fund a place in a care home, but after it was flooded and vandalized, with windows broken, her failure to tell insurers that she was not living there at the time of the burglary meant they failed to pay out.

In sentencing Zeib, Judge John called the burglary a “breathtaking example of further greed”.

Hussain was jailed in October for 10 years and three months on accounts of conspiracy to steal, money laundering, and burglary.

Siddique, 32, and Singh, 40, were both sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison for conspiracy to steal.