Original subtitles

PHONE RINGS

Hello, police, what's your emergency?

Armed police officers!

Elite police units created to crack the toughest of cases...

My role is investigating serious and organised crime.

This was out of the ordinary and this was a high-pressure situation.

Calm yourself down.

..their task, tackle the villains...

You're up for suspicion of murder, all right?

..and bring them to justice.

A real, "Who did it?"

With unique access to some of Britain's most-talented detectives,

we explore, for the first time, their investigations...

Spent years putting together all of these tiny pieces of evidence.

..their methods...

The most bizarre investigation I've been involved in.

..and the evidence that's put some of

the UK's most dangerous criminals behind bars.

They are clever. And they're dangerous.

Across the UK, police are dealing with an epidemic of car crime,

with 2,500 vehicles stolen each week.

It became clear how busy they were in offending.

They were stealing cars almost every night.

Who can steal the most cars? Who can steal the best cars?

Who can drive the fastest?

And organised crime groups like these in Manchester

don't even need keys to steal your precious motor.

The value of the vehicles that were stolen,

it was well in excess of £4 million in a ten-month period.

Go on, you know us. Come on.

How people didn't end up being killed

was just beyond belief, really.

Get him! Ram him now!

Manchester's a great city. Really diverse.

And it continues to grow and develop real, different communities

within different types of the city.

And with that come different challenges around

the crime types that occur.

I'm Roger Smethurst. I'm a detective inspector within

the Serious And Organised Crime Group

working for Greater Manchester Police.

The main aspect of our work is to target organised crime groups

and individuals who are causing problems to the local communities.

In September 2022, the Serious And Organised Crime team receive

intelligence on a gang of car thieves operating in

the Greater Manchester area.

The TVIU is the Tactical Vehicle Intercept Unit,

more commonly known by many as The Interceptors.

They're daily patrolling, going out there, chasing cars,

so they're able to bring operational information into the force.

They believed that there were a group of five or six individuals

who were responsible for a large number of burglaries,

whereby at least one or two cars were being stolen every night.

The interceptors have been investigating an increasing amount

of stolen vehicles across the region over the past 11 months.

We would get a report of a burglary overnight,

a vehicle's been taken.

Sometimes, the offenders have been confronted by the victims.

Sometimes, it would be after the event where a vehicle

has been discovered stolen in the morning.

If you're working on this sort of thing every day,

we start to see trends, patterns, types of vehicles, the locations.

And, so, a trend developed.

Following the patterns of offending,

patrolling officers have some suspicions

of who could be behind the crimes.

You get to know the offenders in the area.

They know how they commit their crime.

It's through being out on the streets,

stopping and talking to people,

stopping cars, recognising faces, knowing what people do.

But the suspects continue to elude

the team with their reckless driving.

We were involved in a number of pursuits with cars

that we believe had been stolen by this group.

Some of those pursuits were called off,

because of the speeds that they were driving at

and the areas that they were operating in

were remote and across the border into other force areas.

Despite best efforts, they were making very little progress.

The staff in the team were a little frustrated that they were unable to

make those links evidentially and attack the conspiracy.

It became apparent that a lot of these were already

in trouble with the police,

but because they were being dealt with in isolation,

the courts weren't seeing the seriousness of

the offending being brought together.

And this is where it would bridge the gap to intelligence and instinct

and experience of officers out on the ground, patrolling,

into evidence that we can present before a court.

And that is the expertise of the Serious Organised Crime Group.

With the suspects still at large and victims increasing daily,

DI Smethurst launches Operation Napoleon.

My first steps were to appoint an investigative team.

So, we identify an officer who's going to be the officer in

the case, which was Chris.

Detective Constable Chris is a covert officer working in

the organised crime team.

The first point of call is make sure the intelligence is correct.

So, here's your intelligence,

here's who we think is committing the crime together,

can you prove it?

We had a couple of people who were named as responsible

for this group.

So, we then start to look at who these people are associating with,

who they're in contact with,

who are they in touch with on social media?

Police scour social media to try and link the names

they have to the offending.

We established that one or two members

weren't particularly that savvy around how they've got

their settings on their social media profiles.

Then, we start to see videos and footage being uploaded

onto social media of what they believe to be stolen cars

and that really started to give us our first proper clues.

ENGINE REVS Yeah, yeah.

It became clear really, really quickly how busy

they were in offending. And they might not always go out together,

but they were committing crime on a nightly basis.

They were stealing high-powered vehicles from addresses,

so specifically-targeted addresses.

For these really expensive cars, we had BMWs, Audis, your Mercedes.

Range Rovers were a big favourite.

With a 47% spike in thefts this year,

Range Rovers topped the list as the most-stolen car in the UK.

They had stolen a Range Rover SVR, which was £108,000.

Within an hour they'd stolen another one, both without keys.

They'd nicked nearly 200 grand's worth of cars without keys.

Keyless thefts, they call them.

Keyless car thefts are built upon wireless technology,

so signals from electronic devices

that should be unique to the vehicle.

But we know that criminals are able to replicate those devices

and replicate the frequency that is required to activate

the car's locking system, for example.

The organised crime team have unravelled something huge.

So, by late September, I'm getting briefed by my team that,

"Yeah, we're onto the right people here. This is a real problem.

"And, actually, boss, we think it's a bigger problem

"than what we've originally been told."

And most concerning of all are the ages of the suspects.

A lot of these are kids. A lot of them are under 18,

15 to, sort of, 19 was the age range with...

I think there was only two adults. They knew how to break into cars.

They're really good car thieves.

And, at 15, you shouldn't really know how to do that.

Sadly, you know, we do see a significant number of young people

stealing high-powered motor vehicles,

driving them at excessive speed.

I think young males are attracted to this sort of crime,

partly because of the exhilaration of the chase,

driving cars that they probably wouldn't have access to

through legitimate means.

There is also an attraction to the money that comes with it.

So, where cars have been passed on for sale,

they are passed on for a fraction of what they're actually worth.

In context, that money is a significant motivator

for young people.

Dealing with kids, there's going to be

a lot more challenges than we're used to.

The rules that govern the courts around juveniles

are really strict,

and you have to tick a lot of boxes before you remand someone.

You're not going to get these great sentences,

because the courts' hands are tied.

It's more about rehabilitation at that point,

to try and get them off that track.

Alongside the shock that they're dealing with

a highly efficient OCG run by teenagers,

detectives have to deal with the impact on the community.

The biggest risk to us was this group

were almost out of control.

So, all it needed was somebody to wake up in the middle of

the night, challenge this group and something could go wrong.

And their worst fears were soon to be confirmed.

It started with one of the males snuck out of his care home,

and we knew he snuck out, because we got CCTV of him doing it,

and he met up with two of his friends nearby.

They then went and burgled an address and stole

the VW Golf from that address.

They then drove to a more affluent area in Manchester,

and they tried to steal a nice BMW from a house.

This time, they disturbed their sleeping victim.

He was upstairs in bed

and he had a daughter in his house that was under one years old.

You can see from the ring doorbell footage that

the victim chased the four offenders out of his house

and further down the road.

They seemed to then realise that there was four of them

and one victim who'd come out of his house bare chested

and just a pair of pants on.

One of them pulled out what looked like a large, shiny object,

whether it was a screwdriver or a knife, we couldn't really tell,

but they then chased the victim back up the road

and you can hear them from this ring doorbell footage

shout, "Stab him!"

The victim stood there and pleaded with him and they stole his car

in front of him anyway.

They drove that car at speed down the road and crashed it at

the bottom of the road and they got off and ran away.

In my mind, I only had one decision,

and that was we've got to arrest people as soon as we can.

Come on.

Officers had to act fast to stop these reckless youths.

What we see is the videos of these lads driving at speed.

It went beyond dangerous.

One of them was filming himself driving whilst smoking cannabis

at 100 miles an hour.

Get him! Ram him now!

Officers of Greater Manchester Police's

Serious and Organised Crime Team are on the trail of

a gang of teenage car thieves who are stealing high-end motors.

We had evidence which identified two key individuals,

so as a team, we looked at that.

We had to do some research to convince ourselves

we knew where these people were living,

cos there's nothing worse than going trying to arrest somebody,

you miss them, and then you've almost given them the heads up that

the police are then looking for them.

The key things for us on arrest were the seizure of mobile phones

and some electronic devices,

because people are so reliant now on technology.

Wherever anybody goes, they take the phone with them.

They record their life on their phones.

In October 2022, police make their first arrests.

No comment. Did you get scared?

No comment. Do you try and scare him?

No comment.

Dealing with them is not a nice experience.

Full of attitude, full of aggression.

Threatened to have a fight with me on the interview.

And I've never had that, having dealt with all kinds of people

and these sort of 15-, 16-year-old lads,

small lads, they're not big,

they just have this attitude that they just don't care.

Go back home, innit? Start your journey back home, innit?

Go on, you littleBLEEP.

The behaviour within custody was just appalling.

No respect for the police officers who were dealing with him,

or the other solicitors.

After hours of interviews with the suspects,

a charging decision is finally made.

To get a juvenile remanded in this day and age,

in any day and age, is really, really tough.

We were able to charge one of them, but we had to release another one,

which, at the time, was really frustrating.

When you're trying to prove conspiracies,

or joint enterprise offences,

it's really hard if one's in custody and one's not.

But the lad that was released on bail made it really tough,

because we wanted to keep him tied in with the lad that was on remand.

This was a huge blow for the team and the pressure was on.

We urgently started reviewing his phone download,

"Right, what can we prove to go and get him back in?"

What they find is a goldmine.

What we see is videos and we see pictures.

Come on.

The videos of these lads driving at speed in cars,

or of them posing in front of cars, or sat in cars.

TTS, as well. Come on.

I've never seen anything like it.

Porsche'll cain you.

He just didn't care.

And when you looked at some of the overtaking that went on,

it went beyond dangerous.

Some of the driving that they filmed...

Get him! Ram him now!

..how people didn't end up being killed

was just beyond belief, really.

I remember one of them was filming himself driving

whilst smoking cannabis at 100 miles an hour.

Cutting through traffic, nearly crashes on one of them.

Wow. My wheels,BLEEP.

They've all got Snapchat accounts, Instagram, WhatsApp messages.

So, we go from investigating what we thought at one stage

was perhaps 20 crimes,

and then we're up to anywhere near 70 or 80 crimes

that these people are responsible for.

Officers have had a breakthrough in their investigation,

but not enough to have the suspects in custody.

We're starting to see this evidence

that corroborates everything that we've been told.

And you see how brazen, how violent...

..how dangerous they are.

Ram him now. No machetes, no machetes.

Ram him now.

It was obvious to us that the other members of the group

were still out there. They were still committing burglaries.

They were still nicking cars.

And the fact that we put one of their mates in prison

didn't seem to bother them one iota.

But their victims were bothered.

The impact of their crimes were harrowing.

There was a lady whose father was living at her address,

because he was receiving palliative care.

The thieves walked past him in the house.

He saw them, cos he was awake at the time in the morning.

Because of the shock, he had to be moved out of the house.

Within a couple of days, he was dead and his daughter,

who was caring for him, she didn't see him again.

That really cut her up. It was awful speaking to her.

It sort of chokes you up when you've got that human element to it.

Officers had to stop these youngsters from getting behind

the wheels of any more stolen motors.

Having reviewed the evidence from the first couple of arrests

over a ten-day to two-week period, it's then a case of deciding, right,

we need to go out and arrest six more people.

So, then we're back in the boat of making sure

that we don't miss anybody.

We usually build complex conspiracies

against organised crime groups, which this lot weren't.

They were that chaotic.

We were working out who was the most dangerous,

or the one causing the most harm across Greater Manchester,

and we had to pick them off that way.

We were trying to build a conspiracy against them all.

The more that we arrested them and we recovered their phones,

we started to develop into a bit more of a group.

The evidence against them was damning.

Because of the nature of wanting to be top dog,

or the bragging rights,

they were almost doing things and then in contact with each other,

which helps us in terms of where they were at various times.

And we could then start to use that data

to review it against crimes that we were seeing occurring.

Come on, the guys.

They're also filming the interior of the car

to show it off to their friends.

So, from those videos, it's at that point then that you can start to see

the dashboard or various other bits within the car.

It might help if there's something visually unique

the owner knows about the car.

So, there might be particular stickers in the windscreen,

for example, or marks on the car.

But, ultimately, for us to identify that car was stolen,

there are numbers permanently etched into the frame,

into the chassis, that help us to identify cars forensically.

An item seized from the properties

help confirm the involvement of the youth.

And then we also had burgling kits from addresses.

So, a lot more grips. A lot of builders gloves.

A lot of balaclavas.

And we also had cash at different scenes,

so kids wouldn't ordinarily have a lot of cash around them.

It was just bringing all that together.

Five are now being held,

but the real work is about proving the broader conspiracy charge.

A lot of the time they were obviously boasting on the phones,

but to link them all together as what you would call

an organised crime group, but an organised crime group,

probably, we couldn't link some of them together.

So, we knew that they had access to a vehicle

and we knew that on a certain day

that this vehicle had gone to the Blackpool area.

So, we put tactics in play, and we stopped that vehicle

and we stopped it on the motorway and we got three people inside it.

We'd linked two of them together, but there was someone we didn't know

that was in that vehicle,

and we then managed to link them all together,

which was a real bonus for the investigation.

After four months solid investigation,

it was good news for the detectives.

It was the 17th December. We had the last one in custody.

We had arrested all eight of them.

But they still had a lot of work to do to develop their case.

It took a little bit of the pressure off, because we realised then,

once they were in prison,

that there aren't any more offences being committed.

So, it allows us to then slow time,

start to go back through all the clues we've got,

all the phone evidence we had to start to try and say,

"Well, what more offences do we know that have gone on?"

We've got bits of forensic evidence that we start to recover.

So, we've got some fingerprints at one of the crime scenes.

We had to re-review all the CCTV, because we'd taken photographs

of clothing that we'd recovered from certain addresses.

So, there was some comparison work done between specifically

some trousers that had some quite reflective stuff on it,

on certain CCTV cameras, ring doorbells.

And then we also had some cell site evidence from their phones

to link them to certain offences.

And mobile phones continue to play a vital role in linking suspects

to that disturbing night of offending.

We arrested one of them and downloaded his phone

at a later date. From the download, we realised that at a specific point

we could prove he was in the house. He turned the light on on his phone

for five seconds and we said that that was when he was looking for

the keys and we said that that was the point that woke the victim up.

Same lad's health app showed that he'd walked a certain distance

on his phone, which linked in almost exactly

to where he lived out of the area.

Roger and his team now had the challenge of collating

all their evidence to prepare for trial.

The amount of data we were uploading onto the court systems was huge.

The number of offences we were looking at,

I think at one point we got near 200.

It's really tough to show all this evidence

when there is so much of it.

So, we decided to try and use one document per defendant

as, like, a case overview.

"Right, we've got this event at this address.

"This is what happened and this is the evidence that we had."

So, we try and keep it to an A4 side per offence.

So, you might have a video on a handset.

You might have a video from Snapchat,

some messages talking about it.

You might have DNA at the scene, or a fingerprint.

And it's just trying to keep it as succinct and simple as that.

After months of hard work, detectives get some good news.

Through that process of presenting the evidence, the conversations,

when we got to court, we never actually had to run a formal trial.

Everybody pleaded.

On the 27th July, 2023, the perpetrators were sentenced.

When you look at the sentences for juveniles,

the courts are really under strict guidelines.

So, I personally think that the courts were as harsh

as possible on the juveniles.

For me, I don't think they were harsh enough.

For me, it's probably the most chaotic group that

I've come across in 29 years of policing.

In their ten-month crime spree, the teen OCG stole 138 high-end cars

worth over £4 million.

It did amaze me the scale of the offending.

The value of the vehicles that were stolen,

the number of houses that had been broken into

and how often this group were out committing crime.

And the teens' addiction to their phones played a massive part

in their conviction.

Oh, yeah. Come on, the guys.

The obsession of youth and using social media these days

to video their activities, especially criminal activities,

is slightly beyond me, in terms of why would you do that?

But it's very helpful for us as investigators.

They just documented it themselves, really.

You know, you know us. Come on.

Albeit there was a lot of work to do,

they did a lot of it for me and made my job that little bit easier

to prove that they'd done what they'd done.

Coming up, when the Serious Fraud Office

gets involved in a case where money is stolen,

the sums can be eye watering.

They decided to carry on with a hole in their books and their finances,

and it just mushroomed and accelerated

into what we came to see.

The company was a massive Ponzi.

A big hole which ended up in a half a billion debt.

PHONE RINGS

In the high stakes world of international finance,

there is no such thing as a victimless crime.

Just because it's a bank, it doesn't make this any less of a fraud.

But is it Macbeth that says,

"Once you've travelled across the river of blood so far,

"you might as well continue to the other side"?

$500 million is quite a substantial sum.

They were desperate, completely desperate.

Being a principal investigator at the Serious Fraud Office,

I see it as a pinnacle of my career.

We deal with the big-ticket frauds, the most complex frauds.

But I just remember looking at this going,

"Oh, my God, it's a beast."

And that's why the Serious Fraud Office does amazing work.

It's not easy stuff. It's not easy.

In early 2013, the financial world is rocked by news that Balli Steel

has gone bust.

Balli Steel fell into administration as a result

of a restructuring effort.

The company was unable to reconcile its finances.

Not being able to reconcile its finances

is a bit of an understatement.

You could pull out what the directors sign as

their closing position and that closing position was stunning.

They owed nearly 500 million. That's a big collapse.

It's a dramatic fall from grace for a multinational company

with high-profile board members.

There was a Conservative peer, Lord Lamont,

who served on its board. He was a former chancellor.

He resigned three days before the company brought in administrators.

Around the same time, the Serious Fraud Office received complaints

from the two banks concerning Balli Steel.

After some preliminary inquiries, SFO case controller Ray Chitham

is given the case.

This case arrived with my case team and I in May 2014.

Rabobank and the Development Bank of Singapore.

We call them DBS for short.

They make complaints alleging that Balli Steel had made

misrepresentations in their trade finance deals

and they had lost a serious amount of money,

tens of millions of US dollars.

Rabobank and DBS are missing $120 million,

but their claims may be just the tip of the iceberg.

Balli Steel were doing hundreds of deals per year.

So, when they went bust in the beginning of 2013,

there were approximately 18 trade finance banks across Europe

and the Middle East and the Far East who had lost money.

Up to about 500 million USD, which is quite a substantial sum.

Now that Balli has gone bust,

the banks are the ones carrying the can.

But for the SFO investigators,

the key question now, is this criminal?

Balli Steel was set up decades before the allegations of fraud

actually came to light

and it garnered quite a bit of respectability.

Balli Steel's story begins with two brothers from Iran.

In 1979, London became a haven for much of Iran's elite when

the Shah was overthrown by

the religious cleric Ayatollah Khomeini.

The brothers, they settled in the UK and they used their contacts in Iran

and around the world to set up a really successful

group of businesses. The primary one was Balli Steel.

It was essentially a family-run business that had grown

significantly over time and, at one point, this company recorded

$1 billion in turnover and they lived a lifestyle

equivalent to that.

The premises of the CEO and other executives was in

the Hampstead area of London, so very well-to-do and private gates

with very nice cars outside.

The brothers twice made the Sunday Times' Rich List,

and in 2009 they were estimated to have a family fortune

of about £130 million.

Along with financial success came, of course, influence.

The brothers became known in British society for being patrons

of Iranian art and culture.

They were donors to the British Museum

and they also were involved in the Iranian Heritage Foundation.

The brothers appeared to be flying high,

but when one of them landed in Switzerland in 2003 to attend

the World Economic Forum in Davos,

he was promptly arrested and taken to Germany.

So, one of the brothers was arrested on suspicion of fraud in relation

to Balli's purchase of a German steelmaker.

He spent about ten months in prison.

The arrest prompted Lord Lamont to write a letter

to try and win bail for his business associate.

I think it's fair to say that the brothers ran things close to

the line, or at least their arrest in Germany suggests that

they ran things close to the line.

But eventually the company that filed the criminal complaint

against him withdrew the allegations,

publicly apologised and shook an undisclosed settlement with him.

But it took several years for that process to play out.

The brothers' legal team said it was a cultural misunderstanding

in terms of the way the takeover was structured,

but Balli Steel's next run in would be with

the American government.

In 2010, the Balli business was fined $15 million

for having violated sanctions.

This involved the export of aircraft from the United States to Iran.

The business essentially chartered a handful of 747s

to a private Iranian airline for their use taking off in Tehran.

The US believed this was an attempt to break the sanctions

against the Iranian regime and obtain American technology.

This obviously upset the US authorities

and Balli ended up paying one of

the largest sanctions-violation fines in history.

$15 million is a significant loss for any company,

but could it have been the catalyst for more wrongdoing,

forcing the brothers to take greater and greater business risks?

I think a lot of times, what you see in fraud cases

are people making bad, pressured decisions

when facing difficult consequences.

By late 2012, some of those bad decisions were coming home to roost.

So, Balli Steel had been in the steel-trading industry

since about 1989, being effectively the intermediary between

the steel manufacturers and the emerging markets.

So, Brazil, the Middle East and the Far East.

To pay for these deals, Balli Steel take out multimillion dollar loans

from banks that specialise in what is called, "Trade finance."

So, Balli is a middleman.

It ships steel from one country to another country.

And the reason why you need trade finance is, in Balli's case,

a lot of the shipments went from Europe to North Africa.

Now, North Africa, if they don't pay,

it's going to be difficult to get your money back.

Their court systems are not the easiest, etc.

Balli mitigates against that risk by getting banks to finance the deal

while the steel is in transit.

Provided the documents say there is a supplier,

there is a customer, there's shipping documents,

there's no risk here for the bank.

If the customer doesn't pay, or something goes wrong,

there's steel on a boat, the bank has that steel.

It owns that steel. So, they get this warm feeling.

"Oh yeah, I'm going to earn a bit of interest, some fees,

"for lending some money on a very low-risk transaction."

It's the fundamentals of international trade.

That's how it's worked for 20 years, or so.

But now, Balli is bust and the banks want to know what's happened

to their money.

So, in September 2012,

Rabobank started to have some suspicions

about Balli Steel and the trades they were involved in.

When we looked at the books and records,

to find a deal that was totally clean was difficult.

In fact, we didn't.

It's 2014, and the Serious Fraud Office

is investigating international steel trader Balli Steel

for a multi-million dollar fraud.

The scale of this case and its international aspects

meant that we needed to contact the suppliers of steel.

They're typically not in the UK. There's the customers of the steel,

they're not in the UK, there's the bank accounts,

of which many are not in the UK.

Before long, the team discovered that Balli Steel's problems began

around the same time it was forced to pay a $15 million fine to

the US government.

Here, it went obviously very wrong, because they stopped repaying

those short-term loans to the banks on time.

And, as that grew, these loans started to default

and it became a situation of what's called a Ponzi scheme,

where they're robbing Peter to pay Paul.

So, Balli Steel were approaching new lenders,

getting in new funds and paying off old debt.

And they had time to do this, because the banks will give you

these funds for about 180 days, before you're expected to

pay it back once the steel has been sold.

So, there's a lot of spinning plates.

At its simplest, this Ponzi scheme involves paying existing banks

in a steel deal with funds collected from new banks

in a separate steel deal.

The gamble that Balli was taking was that they would repay the loans

and make enough profit to eventually balance the books.

Well, this is actually a good basis

to launch an investigation prosecution,

because they're not telling the banks

that we're actually paying off another bank,

because we owe them. And, clearly, that's not right.

But this was just the first level of fraud that

the team will discover.

Then, we go to level two, I'd say.

In September 2012, Rabobank started to have some suspicions

about Balli Steel.

Netherlands-based Rabobank had loaned money for several deals

of Balli, but one shipment had run into problems.

Rabobank wanted to find out what was happening to the steel trades.

Were they going to be liquidated?

Were they going to get their money back?

Rabobank suspects Balli has sold the steel without telling them.

Transocean Navigation, which was a Cayman Islands freight company,

it was, from the start, a company of interest.

Transocean Navigation was critical to this fraud.

The banks believed it was independent freight company

providing genuine documents.

They relied on that documentation.

A bill of lading is fundamental to these transactions,

cos it shows where the steel's been shipped,

the name of the ship, the journey that ship will take,

and, crucially, at the top of the bill of lading,

it will say consigned to, let's say, ABF bank.

ABF Bank will want to see its name on that bill of lading

consigned to ABF Bank.

What is this company? It's in the Cayman Islands.

Obviously, as the SFO, we have the powers to get

in behind these Cayman Island companies,

which I found exciting, because in my past life,

it's very difficult to get behind these shells.

But here at the SFO, you can get behind them

and you can understand them.

And, in essence, Transocean Navigation was a fax machine.

So, the employees at Balli would send a fax to

the Cayman Islands' offshore agent, who managed Transocean Navigation,

saying, "Please, send this to Bank A," and they would.

That document would be, "This steel is in Dubai."

"The steel is in Oman." "The steel is in Egypt."

That's what Transocean Navigation did.

And at least one bank realised this was suspicious.

Transocean Navigation was nothing more than a shell company

set up by the brothers to fool the banks and facilitate their fraud.

There was no steel. The steel had been sold

and Balli Steel had used the proceeds to pay off...further debt.

The problem is, you actually have to ship steel

and sell it to get the money. That takes time.

But if you're in a Ponzi and you're desperate for money,

you don't have that time.

So, then they reached, I call it, Defcon level five.

So, they came up with, what we called in the team, a no-steel deal.

One particular, egregious deal involved

a company in Chicago, Illinois, the US, a company called Magellan,

and the bank involved there at

the end of that 180-day period said to Balli,

"Where's the steel?" Or, "Where's the money?"

Balli didn't respond.

So, we talked to an executive at Magellan who said,

"I had no dealings with Balli for this deal.

"That's not my signature on that contract.

"That's a fake contract. And we wouldn't even buy that steel."

So, they would pretend to buy steel, but there is no steel.

That's when this company is near collapse.

They were desperate. Completely desperate.

Maybe they thought there would be some magic tree at

the end of this that would rescue them all.

But is it Macbeth that says,

"Once you've travelled across the river of blood so far,

"you might as well continue to the other side"?

To see a venerable, well-established company involved in wrongdoing

of this size, over this period of time,

is something quite unique.

After a two-year investigation, the brothers,

along with two other Balli executives, are arrested.

The main suspects in this case was the CEO. He really ran the show.

But you couldn't do this fraud on your own.

It was too big. There's too much going on.

It was a conspiracy between senior executives.

Their legal advisor was given details of the evidence

and all of these questions were put to the suspects

and they answered, "No comment."

The suspects are charged, but the case will not go to court

for almost six years.

This is a complex case and always the challenge in the back

of our minds was, "How do we explain this to a jury?"

However, the no-steel deals really gave the team a lot of impetus,

cos the jury is going to find that a lot easier to understand.

It's going to be a complex case,

but before the trial even begins, the CEO decides to plead guilty.

If someone pleads guilty beforehand,

it is a huge boost to the prosecution

and investigation team, because effectively there's been a fraud.

Jurors were told that essentially one of the people in the conspiracy

had pled guilty to that conspiracy.

The downside, of course, is the individuals in the dock

can say, "Well, it's not me, it's him."

Their defence was that they didn't know what was going on.

They said that they were just taking orders from the chief executive.

But the SFO team find compelling evidence to show how

the lieutenants of the company were directly involved.

One of the executives who was head of trading, she, on a no-steel deal,

prepared the sales contract which was sent to the bank.

She had hijacked company details off the internet

to put on a contract of purchase,

and that contract would be used to show the bank

that there was a customer and therefore the steel would be sold.

Unfortunately for that lady, she picked the wrong logo from

the internet, because the bank thought it was

this company in Qatar.

But the logo was taken from a company in Saudi Arabia.

I guess when you're under the pressure of continuing

a big Ponzi, you make mistakes and you think,

"Oh, my God, that's really stressful."

You actually don't see that in the emails.

You'd think they'd be like, "Oh," pulling their hair out.

"This is terrible." But you don't get that impression.

In fact, the CEO was really calm. He's absolutely ice cool.

In April 2023, two Balli executives were found guilty

and sentenced to just over three years in prison.

One brother, who was chairman, was ultimately too ill to stand trial,

while the other brother, who was CEO, pled guilty

and was sentenced to 6.5 years.

I think the verdicts are important. It shows you've done your job well.

A lot of frauds probably don't get reported through embarrassment,

and maybe they were hoping that that would happen.

But I've got to congratulate the banks in this case for reporting

this fraud, because it's a serious fraud

and it affects international trade.

Banks have individuals who represent the bank.

And when you're talking about huge losses like this,

then obviously it does affect them personally.

This is not a victimless crime. We all have our money in banks.

And the losses incurred by banks

are ultimately charged onto customers, potentially.

And we all pay the price for that.

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