The Great Gangster Film Fraud Storyville

This programme contains some strong language.

SIRENS WAIL

BIRDSONG

PIANO RECITAL

MAN: London, England.

The greatest city on Earth.

It's a landing point for great people

who want to make great things.

Think you can fake it?

This city would chew you up quicker than a dog toy

in the jaws of a pissed-off pit-bull.

That's what happened to the characters in this story.

Professional villains, in the eyes of the law.

According to the suits,

this bunch of mugs were fraudsters of the highest order.

But we got a saying in this metropolis.

HE CHUCKLES

Maybe I invented it.

"If you wish on stars, you could end up behind bars."

Now, a group of conmen have been sent to prison

for trying to scam millions of pounds in tax credits

by pretending to make a big-budget British movie.

The five fraudsters said they had A-lister actors lined up

to star in the movie, but when their plans were uncovered,

they hastily went about making a low-budget film instead.

This Brit flick didn't make the multiplexes,

but the story behind it has got it all.

A daring plot, big-money stakes, international criminals.

It was made to try and cover up a fraud.

Scene 52-1, take 1.

-Louder, louder.

-Louder again? All right. OK.

-Scene 52-1...

-Then you're going to...

Can you clap it twice this time?

So second clap, bam-bam. All right.

Scene 52-1, take 1.

-We have to do that again.

-Cut, cut.

Shall I start from the beginning?

-Yeah, if you'd prefer, yes.

-Yeah. Out.

I'll let our main players introduce themselves, shall I?

-Oh, yeah. Any time, yeah?

-Mm-hm.

-OK.

Hi! My name is Aoife Madden and I would like to welcome you to our...

Hi. My name is Aoife Madden and I would like to welcome you

to our very first video diary for the making of A Landscape of Lies.

My role is the producer.

Hello. My name is Bashar Al-Issa, and I'm going to explain to you

the aspect of how to logistically handle a deliverable of taking

a script from concept into completion.

Um...

..and in a more specific sense,

we're going to get involved into, um...

The Landscape of Lies, the movie.

So, um....getting down to it.

-Um...I'll start again.

-OK, don't worry.

LAUGHTER

-Does this work?

-Yeah, of course.

-And here are the stars of our movie.

A couple of wannabe Harvey Weinsteins.

Lured, like so many before them,

to the glamour and the glitz of making movies.

..scenes and then his family scenes are in this car...

First up, Aoife Madden, Northern Irish.

From a powerful family.

-How you doing?

-Her uncle, Conor Murphy,

is a political mover and shaker for Sinn Fein.

Aoife herself studied acting at drama school.

And I will lie to you from day one.

And use you and screw you and break your heart.

Aoife got off to a flying start.

A bit of Shakespeare here, even a couple of movies.

But acting's a fickle game.

The work dried up,

so she decided to go back to college to retrain as a teacher.

If Aoife's our Bonnie, Bashar is our Clyde.

A property mogul with that casual minted look.

Bashar Al-Issa came from a Middle-Eastern family worth millions.

And he thought big.

In 2005, he had a credit line worth £90 million,

which he was using to develop property sites around the world.

They had grand ambitions.

He started off with one, which was Issa Quay, and then quickly

he had other plans to build a number of schemes in the city.

And they weren't just small schemes, they were skyscraper schemes.

He was the darling of Manchester.

Everyone wanted to do business with this kind of interesting

Iraqi businessman who kind of had this idea that his apartments

were going to be the best in Manchester, if not the UK.

And he would attract investors from Dubai, from Abu Dhabi, from London.

That's his market. That's what he was aiming at.

The reality of when we saw show apartments at Issa Quay

was very, very different.

The toilets had come in from China and were tiny.

Were really, really tiny.

Perhaps designed for the Asian market,

but certainly didn't suit the European market.

Bashar Al-Issa is taking these architectural students

on a tour of the historic Statler building.

It's a building he knows well.

Issa spent 5.5 million renovating the former hotel

into a multiuse building since he bought it in August.

We're making sure that every step we take is planned, designed

and well-thought-of, so it can last years.

To Issa, it's all about the details.

From the emblems in the marble to creating a fourth wing.

And he plans on spending big money to renovate.

So, the overall cost would be approximate, er...

by achieving the fourth wing, as well, about 130 million.

Bashar's 130-million plans were about 130 million short.

By 2008, his property empire was crumbling

like an old digestive biscuit in a vice.

The financial crisis hit.

The bank pulled his credit and he was forced into bankruptcy.

Work here basically stopped.

The workers said, "We're not getting paid, we're out of here."

Can't blame them for that.

There were some legal proceedings that started

over in State Supreme Court. That was in late 2008.

Bashar was told by the judge to show up, he never did.

The judge issued a contempt of court fine on him.

I think it's like 250 a day,

which I think the meter on that is still running, by the way. Huh!

Bashar was just 31 and he'd already seen his first career

flushed down one of his smaller-than-average toilets.

So, he decided to get another business qualification

and went back to his old stomping ground at East London Uni.

He wasn't the type of guy to end up in middle management,

tapping a keyboard in an open-plan office.

No, sir. Bashar had another sky-high ambition -

to become a film producer.

To understand the man, he's never desperate.

He's got no desperate need for anything.

His only desire in life is to be successful.

When one thing closes, he moves to something else.

Property was no longer viable, let's look around for something else.

And he always had an interest in film.

Bashar's tutor at university was this guy, Tariq Hassan.

And Tariq knew Aoife, who was training there to be a teacher.

One of them wanted to act in the movies

and the other wanted to make 'em.

So he introduced 'em.

Bashar soon took Aoife to one of London's smartest hotels,

The Dorchester.

Nice gaff, great bar nibbles.

He asked Aoife to set up a production company

and make films with him.

Which was bold, seeing as Aoife knew very little about film production

and still had a student loan.

But he promised to teach her everything he knew.

'Starting from the beginning, tasks and responsibilities.'

Pre-production is basically planning

all the steps you would do within production.

'Production is the actual construction of the movie.'

Um...so by the time you get to production,

you need to be fully and utterly over pre-production.

Of course, Bashar was bankrupt,

so he couldn't set up a company himself.

But that was a tiny fly in the ointment.

Under Bashar's expert guidance, Aoife set up her own company.

Evolved Pictures.

Don't it look snazzy?

I am from Ireland and, um...

it's a wonderful culture of storytelling

and music-making and all of these different sort of arts and crafts.

And I wanted to bring this through into a modern-day process,

which is the art of filmmaking.

And that's why I decided to embark upon a film.

Aoife and Bashar started out the way any film producer would start out.

By looking for the right script.

My favourite films are Heat, Goodfellas, Taken.

I really like a good crime, thriller, action-packed story.

I saw an advert on a website called mandy.com.

There was an advert for a production company looking for some scripts.

Stuart Knight had just finished a course in screenwriting

at an establishment of higher education called Preston College.

He emailed Aoife his second-year student script for a film

called a Landscape of Lives.

And she loved it.

A Landscape of Lives at the time was set in Los Angeles.

Featured probably about six or seven different interlinking storylines,

kind of like Magnolia or Crash.

And a three-hour drama about these people's lives in Los Angeles.

Even though I hadn't been there. I'd been to New York.

It was a thriller, we were unravelling a murder

and we would find out at the end why all these lives were linked

and...how...

..the linking of lives resulted in the murder and...

Sorry.

Next, they needed to hire people to help plan the production.

They didn't have any money yet, but that didn't matter.

London's full of pretty young things

who dream of getting into the movies.

We met at a popular cafe in the West End.

Um...she sent me the script.

I wasn't going to say, "I think it's a bit of a stupid script,"

because she would've said, "Oh, well, don't work on it, then."

And I wasn't in a position to be able to be that choosy

about any film work that I was offered.

Bashar suggested that maybe I help on the film and I was, like,

"Yes, I'll do it!"

There was no reason for him to do anything nice for me,

giving me a job, um...something that I'd always wanted to do.

And it was just really exciting.

It was like walking along the street on cloud nine.

Romance was also in the air.

Enter stage left the model and dancer, Maeve Madden.

Aoife's sister.

Bashar quickly fell for Maeve and soon they were dating.

Well, wouldn't be a film without a love story, would it?

He seemed like the kind of person that would do anything for her.

Um...and he did a lot for her.

They were a loved-up couple when it was all going smoothly.

The script was in the bag. Now, they needed to finance the production.

Bashar didn't have enough in his piggybank for that.

Being bankrupt is terrible for your bank balance.

But help was at hand.

The British Government offers a nifty incentive

to anyone making a film in the UK.

25% of their budget back in cash on any dosh spent in this country.

It's called the Film Tax Credit. You'd be a mug not to apply.

Aoife began to fill out the forms.

She'd be very chatty about how the UK Film Council

were coming along with her.

Applications, she'd be cross

because she had to go through the whole process again.

Um...you know, she'd just be chatty-chatty about everything.

Financing the film industry is a tricky, difficult, um...task.

However, it's a rewarding task, um...

once you get the right idea, get the right script, push it

and get a dedicated team behind it and make it a blockbuster.

Government subsidies have always attracted sharp investors.

But the Film Tax Credit is only meant to be

a percentage of the total cost.

Bashar and Aoife had to raise the real money for their film

using the support of the British Government as an enticement.

Bashar turned to his own family's multimillion-pound investment

company in the Middle East.

The oddly-named Canadian Primary Industries.

Smelling the cash, Aoife and Bashar went abroad to sell.

We pitched our project.

When I said we pitched, we... We broke down the project,

we gave presentations of the type of actors

that we might be able to have in it.

You have to present budgets, you have to present

comparables of other movies that have been made on certain budgets.

You have to present box-office reports.

Lots of financial things that you have to present.

And, obviously, there are many other things,

but I won't bore you with them.

And finally, we found a company, um...I found a company

that was interested in investing in the project, so we struck a deal.

She was fortunate to have a contact through myself

that would be able to syndicate her loan

and the finance needed to many investors around the world.

They talked about crazy money coming from the Middle East.

They talked about building a studio in Jordan.

They talked about having 250 million to spend.

This is the Landscape of Lives' PowerPoint presentation,

full of A-list actors.

I'm sure Michael Kane, with a K, would have been thrilled(!)

With an untested team of producers, a student's script

and a PowerPoint with more spelling errors than a dyslexic's homework,

Bashar's family company thought about it

and decided to offer Aoife a loan of £19.6 million.

He knows a lot of finances, he has a degree in international economics.

You base yourself somewhere and you work somewhere else

and you can claim start-up expenses and whatever.

He fully understood all those rules and regulations.

The money was coming from a Middle-Eastern connection

who was based in Panama.

Here is where they mystery begins.

You can look at what happened next in two ways.

Theory A - behold!

A bunch of wannabes so desperate to succeed that they bend the rules

until they break 'em.

Or Theory B - a gang of scammers who planned it all from day one.

Aoife felt like she was dreaming.

In a few months, she had gone from being an out-of-work actress

to a film producer with a full script and a £20 million budget.

But then she woke up from her dream

and realised she had no bleeding idea how to make the thing.

So she began to look for another company who'd do the job for her.

I felt that I needed to have a team onboard with me

that would help the project progress and move forward

so that they could contract and negotiate

and organise all of those things.

Because it's a very creative, um...

It's a very creative world and you want to be involved very creatively.

And sometimes, we can get pulled away into the non-creative side.

So those people that came on to help me

were from a company called AB Productions.

She was always quite cagey about AB. She mentioned them to me.

I didn't really know who AB were,

who the sort of people involved were.

She said to me that she really saw my role as creative director,

so she wanted me to take a step back.

Here's one for those of you

who take the less-charitable view of this lot.

AB had even less experience in filmmaking than Aoife Madden.

The company was run by two sorts who worked for Bashar

when he was a property developer in Manchester.

A construction manager, Osama Al Baghdady

and an architect, Ian Sherwood.

I remember quite distinctly Bashar saying to me,

"I'm looking at this film project, would you be interested?"

Now, I said I wasn't experienced enough in film

to be able to contribute anything more than,

"Yeah, OK, you can use my office address."

Osama, I knew from the construction side, from Bashar's property group.

And Osama can have that office address and Osama can work from it.

Osama is the director of AB Productions,

Osama is the contact between you and the people making the films.

And now, they were a magnificent seven.

Bashar Al-Issa, the lead producer,

Aoife Madden, the creative producer,

Sarah Clarke, the production manager,

Tariq Hassan, the accountant,

Osama Al Baghdady and Ian Sherwood,

who were apparently going to organise the making of the film

because it was too difficult for Aoife.

And Maeve Madden was a model, or location scout,

product-placement executive, or something.

Together, they thought they could rewrite the rules of filmmaking

on that little whiteboard there.

-Hi.

-I'm sorry. I've got someone for an audition here.

-Ah, OK.

-Shall we...?

-Yeah. OK. Thank you.

Bashar said that he felt he could run a film

exactly like a building site.

And therefore, he felt people with the same skill sets could do this

if they could do that.

And now comes the strangest episode in this story.

The company that Aoife hired to make the film, AB Productions,

sent her an invoice for £5.3 million for work they hadn't done yet.

800,000 of that was VAT.

The fat 20% tax Her Majesty's Government creams off

mostly everything we buy.

You can claim that back if you're a limited company,

and that's what Aoife did on behalf of Evolved.

But she never actually got around to paying AB's invoice itself.

HMRC does have a duty to pay out VAT that we owe to people,

or they say they owe to us on a VAT return.

And particularly if it was a business that needed to,

as we were told at that point, pay other expenses

and carry on making this film.

The following month, Aoife submitted more claims to the taxman.

There was one for another £500,000 in VAT.

Plus a claim for a Film Tax Credit to the tune of another £250,000.

Things were looking fishier than a nun in a nightclub.

Fishiest of all was the £19.6 million budget

they'd scored in the first place.

Even the biggest British movies cost half that.

And British crime flicks are made for well under a million.

Even ones by the genre's big daddies,

like producer Jonathan Sothcott.

He'd love 20 mil to play with.

We are making these films for DVDs. You know, that's the core audience.

Um...and what I call the geezer-movie audience

still likes to buy a meat-and-potatoes product.

They go to Asda and they buy one of these with their weekly shop.

You know the Kray twins? He was just like them.

He could've put a bloody spaceship in that.

-That sounds like fun.

-What we make are independent British movies.

They have a certain appeal to a very wide audience.

They still perform incredibly well on DVD.

I don't think there's any shame in that.

When I was a kid, growing up in the '80s, getting a video

from the video shop was just as much of a treat as going to the cinema.

You'll finish these guys and then...

..you'll vanish.

Avengers Assemble is a steak dinner and this is a McDonald's.

Action!

And 20 million gets you a fair few Happy Meals.

First-time filmmakers having a budget of £19 million? Impossible.

I don't know where that came from. That's just nonsense.

I mean, that just has dodgy written all over it.

But, of course, the problem is, to the layman in the street,

or the pub or wherever they tap up their victims, when you say,

"I'm making a £19 million movie," it sounds much more impressive than,

"I'm making a film down the road for a bag of chips and some peanuts."

That fact didn't escape Her Majesty's tax inspectors either.

So they asked Aoife to show them what had been shot

so far on the big-budget blockbuster,

A Landscape of Lives.

Aoife asked me to organise a test shoot of selected scenes

from A Landscape of Lives, but there was no budget for the test shoot.

I had to get all the equipment, the lights, the cameras

and stuff completely free off the back of contacts that I had.

And the DOP, who was a student that I brought in to shoot it,

he had his own camera, so he brought that.

Everybody else worked for a minimal fee.

-Are you fucking crazy?!

-Wait!

-No, you wait!

Have you any idea what he'll do to us if he finds out?

I know how crazy it sounds, but trust us. We know what we're doing.

Just imagine a group of students getting together

and acting out some pretty disjointed,

not particularly well-written pages of script

with a borrowed kit, without all the lights and, you know,

with none of the location that... you know,

it was really shot in someone's flat in one room.

I mean, it was just atrocious.

-He said he'll come.

-He'll be here.

Yeah, well, he fucking better be!

The test shoot was four men in a room, looking angry.

And to us, fairly untrained,

we did think it was slightly humorous that something

that would feature Omar Sharif would start in such a humble way.

HMRC put two and two together

and found they didn't quite make four, they made minus 800,000.

It's a lot of money. It's £800,000.

I have to try to get that back. How are we going to do that?

We're going to do that by arresting, by searching and prosecuting.

For Aoife and the rest of the seven dwarves,

whether this was a gigantic balls-up

with tax papers filed before the Jordanian cash had come through,

or a genuine shot at thieving,

things were about to get pretty nasty.

Yeah, April 11th was obviously quite a traumatic day.

Being arrested at 7:30, walking out of my house to go to work,

um...it's something I would hope never to have repeated.

There was a buzz on my buzzer and I thought,

"Oh, God, it will be the Jehovah's Witnesses, I won't answer it".

Buzz-buzz-buzz!

I thought, "Oh, I'd better answer it". And it was HMRC.

He came in and explained that they were under investigation.

I went completely cold and I was just, um...really shaking.

I couldn't have probably looked more guilty if I'd tried.

I just looked like your archetypal, you know, er...villain.

Sarah Clarke, a drop in this bucket of buffoonery,

handed over all her emails to HMRC

and was soon eliminated from their investigation.

But the other six were deep in it.

I met up with Bashar and Aoife the day after they'd been arrested.

And Bashar was sort of...

I don't think he really understood what had happened.

Aoife was in bits and pieces. She was crying. She was very upset.

Because she couldn't understand what she'd done wrong.

Seven producers of A Landscape of Lives have been arrested

and then released on bail. Why?

For claiming the tax on the movie they didn't, or couldn't make.

Charges for VAT and Film Tax Credit fraud soon followed.

All the producers for the Landscape of Lives could do now

was wait for the trial.

Or was it?

Bashar and Aoife decided that they should finish the film,

because the whole case against them

appeared to be there was no film and this was a sham.

Initially, when we were arrested, it was clearly put to us that this

was a complete bogus situation and it was never intended to be a film.

But I don't think that is the case.

I'm sure there was always an intent to make a film.

That's what he wanted to do. And he wanted to be Quentin Tarantino.

NARRATOR CHUCKLES Quentin never got arrested.

You heard right, by the way, our producers thought

the best foot forward was to make the film regardless.

But making a movie on bail would present new challenges.

The investors Bashar claimed he had lined up had now pulled out.

"Scared off by the investigations", so he said.

That meant no £19.6 mil.

And no cash meant Michael Caine and his ilk

were completely out of the picture.

But London has another kind of film industry.

The world of low-budget filmmaking.

A reservoir of undiscovered talent.

HUBBUB

We worked together on the doors for 10 years or so.

Different clubs and then occasionally,

-we'd join up at the same club.

-I used to love it.

I used to turn up, five minutes in it, first punter give me

the dirty look, spank! "You ain't coming in. Next!"

There were times you would razz to a club because it was kicking off.

We'd be on a door and you'd get, "Oh, it's kicking off down the..."

I don't know, "the Rose and Crown. It's kicking off". "Let's go!"

He'd get in his car and he'd burn down there just to get in a ruck.

In the late '80s, early '90s, I was quite happy to have,

like, a three-minute scrap.

But it just reached a point where,

"If I'm going to get in a fight, I'm going to put you down fast."

And I would be using manoeuvres that were dangerous

because I just didn't want to fight.

It was a case of, "You're going down".

I'd punch people in the throat, I'd do whatever needed to be done.

My attitude was, you beat someone up,

the following week, they come back with ten mates.

You kill someone, they ain't coming back.

And that's how my mindset was getting.

SHOUTS OF ENCOURAGEMENT

An incident went off on the door and my daughter had been born

and CS gas and pepper spray went off.

And by the time I got home, obviously, I was covered in it.

Usually, I'd get home at 4, 4:30, as she was waking up for a feed,

so I would get in, feed her, my wife, she'd carry on sleeping.

But this particular night,

I couldn't touch her because I was literally head to toe CS gas.

It was all on my clothes.

And it was from that point I thought, "You know what...?"

And that was my last night.

Well, the writing was to get out the demons

from the days of doing the door work.

It was a way just to express myself and just...

There's a lot that sits on your conscience and on your chest.

It's... You know, you need a way to vent that.

# Roll out the barrels

# Welcome to London

# Roll out the barrels

# Have a cup of tea with me

# Welcome to London

-# Welcome to...

-# London is the place to be... #

The reason I got into filmmaking was to prove a point to another writer.

The initial idea behind Thugs, Mugs and Violence

was that there was a lot of talk at the time

about how expensive it was to make a full production feature film.

As a published author, I think

Paul got into conversation with someone and said,

"Well, I, for the life of me can't see where all the money goes.

"And I'm pretty positive that I could produce a movie for,

"you know, less than 10 grand."

Are you sure this story has no heroes to root for

and no fairy-tale ending?

My readers will love it. The end of the London crime scene.

It's not ended, it's just been forced to change its players.

First up is Tony Declan, AKA The Ant.

He runs South London.

He's a nasty bastard and he doesn't like being pissed off by people.

We got a cast together.

Er...scraped together a lot of favours.

Er...produced some good scenes within the film

and some not so good.

Um...I think, basically, down to the fact that we quickly realised

we'd bitten off more than we could chew with things like, um...sound.

MUFFLED SOUND

And, um...er...various people's acting abilities.

-We'll have this dance later!

-Tiff!

Oh!

Hold on, rewind a little bit. A bird took down Fearsome?

Ah, yes, Natalia. The six-foot-five Serbian.

The deadly killer is part of the Slavic movement in London.

I had so much fun on our first film,

despite the fact it was day after day of disasters,

but from there, it was, like, "You know what, I can..."

I could see a career in this and that's what I went for.

Paul Knight had directed a handful of films which had never

been released, though he had uploaded some of them to Youtube.

Now came his big break.

I sat down with AB productions

and we came up with a list of wonderful directors.

Because it's very important that you look at directors' works

and see how they work.

You know, what type of images they want to give the audience,

the type of audience they attract,

the type of shots they're interested in,

the type of films they're interested in

and what style they're either coming from or going to.

When you say big, big fuck-off deal. Just how big are we talking about?

As big as your cock.

THEY LAUGH

Because the film was gangster, thriller,

we decided to look for someone in that genre.

Hi, I'm Paul Knight, cofounder of New Breed Productions

and I am part of a Landscape of Lives

as the screenplay writer and director.

I was asked to rewrite Landscape of Lives.

I read the original and...

HE EXHALES

I could see where the author was trying to go,

um...but I would say, from a writing point of view,

his own life experiences...

..made him oversee or fantasise a little bit too much.

Because he didn't know how the real world worked.

PIANO RECITAL

Paul had drawn on his own real-life experiences and reworked

Stuart Knight's script for our bail birds, Bashar and Aoife.

The LA thriller had become an Essex crime caper with violent gangsters,

an Iraqi war veteran and a mystery killer on the loose.

Things were looking up.

SHOUTS OF ENCOURAGEMENT

Freddie and Cliff don't need any introductions,

if you're from the East End, South London.

Did I tell you?

Paul has connections. He's the godson of Charlie Kray.

Paul, he's been a face for years round about, you know?

He's come from where we all come from, you know,

the other side of the fence.

What do you think of all these British gangster movies?

I haven't seen a good one yet.

-Why not?

-Because they're not real.

They're not proper.

They're writers writing a load of shit, to be honest.

They don't know what it's all about and they never will do.

-They don't ask the proper people.

-They don't ask the right people.

Even when they made the Train Robbery, I mean, Buster,

he was one of the loveliest guys in the world

and yet, they made him look an idiot.

When they done The Krays,

Violet Kray is the loveliest lady you could ever meet.

It's not a glamorous life being a gangster, anyway.

You've got to make them real people.

They're just normal people, like everyone else.

They've got that criminal streak in them

and they want to improve their lifestyle.

You listen to me, you change your attitude, or you'll regret it.

Are you threatening me, Miss?! I'll have your job for that, yeah!

Hannah Clancy, make your way to the headmaster's office now.

-I'll be along shortly.

-Why - for a threesome?

-Yeah, you wish.

-Out!

Cut.

Paul Knight was knee-deep in production.

He'd become a pawn in a mug's game.

He'd written the script,

but he didn't know what was happening behind the scenes.

He began to cast his blockbuster

with a new budget from Bashar of under £100,000.

Not that that stopped him going after some big names.

-Thank you.

-Yay!

That's lovely. I'm so happy!

Trying to find a strong British actress that was known,

that was in the late 30s bracket

that you wasn't going to be paying Hollywood money for was tough.

When I was describing the character of Audrey to my wife

while writing, she flicked on the TV to Loose Women and she said,

"You've just described this woman".

And it was Andrea McLean.

Oxford Dictionaries have revealed their word of the year.

It's something long, hard to pron... Something long and hard!

I just contacted her agent and I said,

"Look, I know she doesn't act,

"but I've got this film, we're shooting this month".

And the agent said, "Well, I'll pass on the script to her".

And then I got an email direct from Andrea.

She said, "Look, I haven't acted,

"but I would kick myself if I turned down an opportunity".

She said, "I can't guarantee I'm going to be any good".

And it was, like, "Well, from what you've read, I can work with."

And that's how we got her involved.

I got a phone call from a friend of mine who's in the kind of film game.

And just said, "Danny, there's a part come up. Are you available?

"The director's seen your work, he's happy for you to play it.

"Do you want to come along and do it?"

I said, "Send me over the script".

I saw the script, it was a bit of a PA secretary part,

which is kind of different to what I normally play, so I was, like,

"Great. Show a bit of variety."

Paul came to me, I was working in a bar in Soho

and he literally offered me the role.

He had me down for playing Tess in the film.

And working with the calibre of actors he was showcasing to me,

I was, like, "Yeah, man, bang in there!"

So, yeah, it was a great opportunity and I love how Paul writes.

Like, he's like a modern-day, er...er...urban Shakespeare.

I try and keep it flowing as far to the end as possible.

I mean, we did... On the rough draft of it, we had a quick read-through.

I want that land and you're going to sell it to me.

-Why would I do that?

-Because you're a smart man.

You have a lovely family, a great home.

-Do you want to keep that?

-Are you threatening me?

Did you hear me threatening you?

I think you've seen too many gangster movies.

You look around this city and you can't throw a stone

without hitting something that is there because of me.

I make no bones that in my past, I've done bad things.

I ran with bad people, was in certain crowds.

We did things.

And my wife criticises my work

because she says I don't put no heart into my characters.

I live in a world where... That's because I know there is no heart.

You know what I mean?

That is for soppy love stories, that's not the real world.

The real world, this is how it is.

But I do know that a film's got to have four "oh-ohs",

and one "Oh, fuck" moment.

The land isn't for sale. Construction is already under way.

Then change them and find somewhere else to build,

or you will find out just how far my influence goes.

Nah. I think it's you that's watched too many gangster films.

I don't watch gangster films,

I'm the fucking evil bastard that they all are based on.

I think you'd better leave now, before I call security.

Shut up, you fucking muppet!

These are lines, in all fairness,

that I have said to people in... a previous life, if you like.

-Er...

-Paul thought this film was his big break.

His reward for going straight.

But it's hard to leave the place you've come from.

Maybe it was a sixth sense, but the last detail,

just before shooting, Paul added a final correction to the script,

removing one letter from the title.

A Landscape of Lives became A Landscape of Lies.

Scene 32, slate 1, take 6.

There is a lot of fine detail.

And the fine-detailing of that comes down to

motivating a team to do the vision, which is within words.

And moving that words from actual words into a story,

which is visually... Can be conveyed.

And that pulls a lot of consensus.

OK, good. Yeah.

Scene 32, slate 1, take 1.

And so began one of the most imaginative attempts

to cover one's tracks in the history of covering one's tracks.

This was going to be a movie like no other -

in which the entire cast and crew, unbeknown to themselves,

would be acting out an alibi for a multimillion-pound fraud

against Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.

Why indeed, Mr Fassbender?

Day one on business, we clashed. Because he didn't have...

The deal was, I was getting the crew on

and we was paying 50% of their money upfront

and they wasn't getting the rest

until the end of the shoot, when we wrapped.

And I said, "Right, I've got the DOP, I've got the sound guy,

"I've got the lighting guys, they're all coming up to the office.

"I will need whatever the sum was there so I can pay 'em."

And he failed to get the money.

So straightaway, it was, like, "Well, you're making me look silly.

"I'm doing you the favour, all you had to do was supply the money.

"Go get the money.

"You keep telling me you're a rich bloody building guy,

"go to your bloody bank.

"I can go to my bank. Go to your bank and get the money."

He took offence, felt he shouldn't be spoken to like that.

So straightaway, we're locking... you know. He's not having it.

I won't take his bollocks

and I certainly wasn't going to bow down to him.

There was kind of like a power struggle between Paul and Bashar.

Because Bashar likes to be, um...

Bashar and Aoife, they both like to be in control.

So, our cast was meant to arrive at 3.00, it is now 5.55. Huh!

Luckily, we still aren't ready for them,

but they are three hours late.

-But we have food.

-Food has been ordered.

-Dinner is pasta, pizzas...

-Lasagne.

..lasagne, bolognese and much more out in the kitchens.

Lots of chocolate, lots of coffee.

Lots of coffee.

And we're trying to get it ready,

but we're quite concerned that we have no crew and no cast

-at present.

-It's just us.

-And we don't know where they are.

-HE SIGHS

-As a producer?

Eager...

willing...

..inexperienced. There you go, there's three words.

To be honest, it was like any other, um...low-budget British film set.

You know, it was quite organised.

The first AD seemed to be quite organised and prompt.

We was moving forward quite quickly.

The director seemed to know what he wanted

and he spent time with the actors, but not lots and lots and lots.

We wasn't shooting hundreds of pages a day, but enough.

Charmed, I'm sure.

And cut!

I concluded my final day's shoot and from what I'd seen personally,

I thought we had something that was pretty worthy.

At the end, it was just a great feeling that that was it.

We wrapped.

Um...I was in a position to pay off the heads of departments'

final payment, everyone was settled and it was, like,

down the local boozer, let's have a couple.

For the cast and crew involved, that was the day they finished

and my journey continued.

And obviously, then, it was,

"Well, now you need to settle up some bills

"before it goes into edit and now you need to do this and..."

As far as I was concerned, four months, we've gone from

finalising a script, here's your finished film.

We went for a viewing around Aoife's flat Sunday night.

Didn't even start watching it till, like, one in the morning

because I literally came straight from the editor's house

and just went, "There's your finished product. Give it a watch."

We all sat down, they had, like, comfy sofas and a projector.

-So we watched the film.

-RAPID GUNFIRE

-What the fuck was that?!

-Pull back!

-I can't see a fucking thing!

-Pull back!

Pull back! Everyone pull the fuck back!

RAPID GUNFIRE

HE GASPS

The whole idea of whatever your budget is,

your end result's got to look like it's ten times more.

Um...and I believe, with the production value and the props

and the cars and what we used in the film...

..you wouldn't doubt that it could cost a million pound.

HORN BLASTS

Oi-oi, saveloy.

Sarge. You, er...coming or going?

I've already finished coming, son.

Hop in, I'll treat you to breakfast.

Basically, we've got a couple of guys who've met in the army,

um...have served together,

um...have both been honourably discharged.

-You stay and finish up. You got my back?

-Always.

I know you do, soldier.

You stay safe.

And all of a sudden, one of them has been found murdered.

And so his friend, who's served with him,

has decided that something's not quite right

and he'll start to conduct his own type of investigation.

-Jane?

-Yeah.

-Brannigan sent me.

-Ah, you're Jacob, right?

-Yeah.

Welcome to the Blue Lounge.

-Is this a strip club?

-Burlesque.

-Is there a difference?

Big-time. Burlesque is really in at the moment.

The crowd loves it. It's more tease than sleaze.

It's not a straightforward revenge, it's not a straightforward thriller,

it's not a straightforward drama, it's not a straightforward romance.

So it's just a collection of four people's lives entwined

and there just happens to be murder and intrigue

and double-crossing involved.

-You bastard! What did you do to him?!

-What you talking about?!

You were working with him last night! You're here and he's dead!

I came over as soon as I seen it on the news.

I'm DCI Lane.

We had a good script, um...we had some...some...um...

loosely termed, named actors.

Certainly people you'd recognise off the TV.

-Your friend seems to have had a great night.

-Mm.

-She deserves it. She's a good girl.

-Oh, really?

And what about you? Good girl? Bad girl?

-Oh, I'm a bad girl.

-Yeah?

I'm a really bad girl!

I'm a massive fan of Loose Women, so when I saw it,

I was, like, "Oh, my God, you're that chick from Loose Women!"

And she goes, "Yeah, yeah, I'm Andrea McLean."

I was, like... Um...it was a real pleasure to meet her,

because we actually had a little chat because she was nervous.

How's Alice?

She's good. She misses you.

You should come over for dinner one night.

And our relationship in the film was basically that we had

something kind of, maybe going on.

So there was another sort of, um...puzzle, you know,

a bit of the landscape happening that Paul was sort of trying to,

er...piece together.

The land isn't for sale.

Construction plans are already under way.

Hm.

Change 'em.

Look at me.

And go and build yourself somewhere else.

Or you will see just how far my influence goes.

I think it's you who's watched too many gangster movies.

HE CHUCKLES

I don't watch gangster movies!

I'm the evil fucking bastard that they base them on.

I think you'd better go before I call security, OK?

There was a bit in the film when, um...I say something like, um...

"I will find you and I will kill you."

It was kind like, um...in, er...

Liam Neeson in Taken. I had that in my head.

You involve the police...

..I WILL kill you.

And your wife. And your daughter.

And your fuckin' next door neighbour's cat.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it, with the exception of Bashar.

"I didn't get it."

And it was like,

"Well, it's the script that you had four months ago."

"Well, I didn't read the script, so..."

I said, "Well, this is your film."

They tied her to that dead body they found down at the site.

What?

Did she do it?

How would I know?

Cos that woman don't fart unless you tell her to.

Yeah, well, they didn't nick her for farting, Jacob,

they nicked her for murder.

The film has some desert scenes in it,

so we had to think about how we would organise

how we would get a team out into the Middle East

to film the desert scenes.

We found out, actually, that the best way to approach that

was to go to Jordan,

where the Jordanian Film Council welcome a lot of films -

Hurt Locker was filmed there, many other films have been filmed there,

so they welcomed us very well -

but that's another story, which I'll go into another time.

In Landscape Of Lies I was a soldier.

Um...yeah.

I turned up to location, and...

the first thing I thought was,

"Oh, my God, this film is going to be crap."

Jake, pour me a big one, will you?

-And a small fruit juice for the lady.

-Fuck off, I'll have what I want!

-Ease off her, she'll kick your arse, mate.

-She can lick my arse.

We both know you don't go back to front.

Sullings, you ever been mistaken for a man?

-No, have you?!

-Attention!

-LAUGHTER

Pretending to be in the desert, when I was actually in a...

Where were we?

Um...was it Essex? I can't remember.

But in some quarry somewhere!

When you have Maeve and Aoife dressed in burqas,

and they have, like, a table and someone selling fruit, I think...

and there was, like, a boy in a burqa...

It was just laughable.

Now, you can see why a geezer might think

this lot were not arch-villains.

Which self-respecting criminal would try on a cover-up like this?

The first time I met Aoife was at the Soho Screening Rooms

at the screening of Landscape Of Lies,

and Aoife was kind of running the screening.

So, I watched this film,

and the producer asked me, "What did you think of the film?"

And I said, "Well, for one thing, you've got typos in your credits."

She said, "Typos?" I said, "Yes, you've spelt words wrong -

"like 'colourist' is spelt 'courist'."

And I said, "You should get that right, really."

And, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll make a note of that."

And then I said, "Well, why would you invent a second unit in Jordan?

"There's no second unit." "Oh, no, yes, there is!"

I said, "No, you filmed this...

"you filmed this army scene in a field in Dorset,

"it's, like grass," you know?

"I've lived in the Middle East, this is not filmed in the Middle East."

"Oh, no..."

So, I questioned Bashar -

I said, "Why would you invent a second unit in Jordan?"

"Oh, no, we DO have a second..."

I said, "No." I said, "All of the names of the crewmembers..."

Because I've lived in the Middle East, I know Middle Eastern names -

the equivalent was "John Smith", "Mary Blogg", "Joe Blogg",

I mean, these were generic Arabic names.

-GUNSHOT

-Oh, shit! Contact, contact!

-What the fuck was that?

-GUNSHOT

I can't see a fucking thing! Pull back.

Pull back - everyone pull the fuck back.

-Pull the fuck back!

-GUNSHOT

KNOCK AT DOOR

We weren't to know that they were going to make a film

until another very astute officer was doing some research

on the internet and realised that all of a sudden,

a film that WAS going to be made, called A Landscape Of Lives -

which wasn't a film, and we were absolutely certain wasn't a film -

had now become something called A Landscape Of Lies.

What are you doing here?

I just needed someone to talk to.

Come in.

We were staggered, to be honest -

in fact, it was the cause, initially, of much hilarity -

that Mr Al-Issa believed if he produced a film,

the case would go away.

And we all firmly believed, to a man, on the team,

they were doing this in order to prevent us

charging them with the fraud.

Bashar and Aoife had a lot to prove -

but why the Jordanian ruse?

It was the wrong time to play silly with the authorities.

The British Government had started investigating

a handful of film producers and financiers for film tax fraud.

Their inquiries had dragged on -

up until this point, without many guilty verdicts.

There have been about 255 investments.

How many of them have actually been investigated or challenged by HMRC?

Er, so, I have that information.

Um, of the 255, 127 have been subjected to HMRC inquiries,

13 are in litigation,

two have been fully litigated,

all they way to the Court of Appeal, and we won both.

The taxman was under pressure to find a clear-cut case, and win it...

and then, along came A Landscape Of Lives.

So, the officer looked behind the company

that allegedly supplied lighting, crew and production costs.

Aoife Madden produced to him invoices with AB Productions on -

who are they? Where are they?

It was a very simple job for him to go back into the office,

look into AB Productions,

so he contacted colleagues in Manchester, he said to them,

"Would you go round?

"Do they look like a film company?"

The crazy thing that did happen is that, because of my nature,

I allowed myself to sit in a VAT meeting -

which, again, used my office -

and principally, because Osama isn't a very good communicator,

and knowing that from having worked with him

inside the construction side,

then I tried to explain to the VAT officer

that this WAS a legitimate film, cos it's what I believed,

and explain what was happening.

So, she then reads into,

well, I'm just carrying on the lie that exists.

Her Majesty's Customs & Revenue

thought they'd uncovered a classic, time-honoured scam -

the VAT "carousel".

They'd seen three different companies all set up by Bashar -

Evolved, AB and A to Z -

all making A Landscape Of Lives.

These companies had billed each other for the damage,

and claimed back thousands in VAT -

without paying out any dosh themselves.

And then they wired that cash into accounts in a foreign country

where they HADN'T been filming.

We know that the £800,000, when it was paid out by HMRC,

left the country pretty quickly.

It went off to banks in Jordan.

Fraud, generally, it's about money. It's about greed.

It's how much people can get out of whatever rip-off they're running.

So, the money moves very, very quickly, in my experience,

out of the recipient account.

Because one of the things, clearly, that we are going to do,

as investigators, is look at where the money's gone.

Follow the money, you can usually unravel the fraud.

The more I hear about the shenanigans on this

Landscape Of Lies, the more amazed I am.

Because if I put in a VAT rebate claim for a grand,

they're all over it forensically, trying to not give it to you,

because, you know - the Revenue are lovely,

but they never want to give you any money back.

I mean, HMRC scrutinise everything.

I really don't know how they managed to get that under the radar.

You know, I guess maybe they were on holiday that week.

Aoife and Bashar had been on bail for eight months,

and had produced a feature film -

and once they'd done it, they didn't fancy stopping there.

It was enjoyable, this film lark.

They submitted A Landscape Of Lies to international film festivals.

It was accepted by two of the minor ones -

Marbella, in Spain...

..and Las Vegas...

coincidentally, two hotbeds of organised crime.

Bashar wanted to sell the film,

so he took it to Europe's biggest festival,

Cannes.

-ALANA:

-Cannes was really good.

Me and Bashar drove down to Cannes, and I had set up

a load of meetings with distribution companies and sales agents -

we had a meeting with Universal -

and Bashar was wanting to sell Landscape Of Lies -

but he also wanted to know what was selling really well,

what audience wanted.

They said that you could sell horror a lot easier

than you could a British crime thriller -

and that's why we ended up making Crux.

Bashar didn't sell A Landscape Of Lies in Cannes,

but the trip inspired him to try his hand at another movie genre.

Aoife's brother Joe wrote the script in two weeks,

and Aoife found the location.

We shot a film in...I think it was, like, a month, end-to-end.

Bashar did say he thought he'd learnt enough to direct

the next one, after Landscape Of Lies.

This probably wasn't true - but the idea was,

he thought he probably could.

I think it was something like 25,000 to make Crux.

Though that's not the figure on "the Wikipedia of the movies" -

the IMDB website.

GIRL SCREAMS

I thought it should have been a comedy film,

because horror and comedy do go well together.

We urgently need your help. Do you have a phone we could use?

'But as a horror film, it stank.'

A phone?

A telephone?

Look, please, do you have a telephone or not?

Ah, yes. A telephone!

Paul Knight was surprised

his old producers were still playing doubles.

It was later in the year. I met Aoife for drinks,

so this is... I haven't spoken to Bashar for months at this point.

The film, obviously, went on into some film festivals

and she contacted me because she needed new copies.

And that's when she was telling me,

"Bashar, you know, he really stuffed me over,

"he's trying to set me up to take the fall for all this."

And I was like, "Oh, wow," but in the next breath

I said, "But then you've made Crux with him. So..."

"Oh, yeah, well, you know, I've got to stick with him."

I knew that Bashar had a court case coming up

but that, according to him,

was to do with his properties in Manchester.

Bashar made it seem as though everything was hunky-dory, really.

We're presented here with three companies

and a group of individuals that are not credible,

that have already had £800,000 out of HMRC,

but actually if they'd had their way and everything had gone to plan,

they would have got away with 2.5 million.

And that's far too much money.

That... They've got a lot of money out of us,

but they're really going for the big one on the film tax credit side.

I was instructed in the autumn of 2012.

It was the first film tax credit case that I had done,

and in fact, I think, I believe,

it's the first one that's actually been through the courts, I think.

So it was sort of learning how the fraud worked,

as much as the evidence to prove this particular fraud.

A case this big, tens of thousands of documents,

lots of digital material to look at,

lots of computers, lots of phones.

It's quite unusual to charge within six, seven months,

quite often it's longer than that.

Bashar had no anxiety about this.

He didn't think he'd done anything wrong.

He always seems to have a very simple, spiritual view of the world

and everything in it.

He just couldn't understand why they were pursuing him.

In autumn 2012, the trial date was finally set

for the end of January the following year.

But even with the legal eagles circling round, our producers felt

there was still time for one last roll of the movie-making dice.

Now, this is exciting.

We're about to take you on the set of a horror film as it's being made.

The film is Dissection,

so let's take a peek.

Hi, I'm Mel, reporting for Indiecan.

We're here today on the set of new horror film Dissection

at Murder Mile Studios in North London. Let's go and have a look.

I came across this job by responding to an ad online for a sci-fi writer.

I sent an outline for a sci-fi film, didn't hear from them for months

and then out of the blue, I got an e-mail

and they sent me a treatment for a sort of torture porn horror movie,

so I was invited in for a meeting at an office in Edgware Road.

Bashar was in a kind of flurry the whole time.

He had this way of just...

..you know, talking abundantly,

but saying absolutely nothing at the same time.

We decided to do another horror

and throughout the journey, I was thinking about ideas

of a different horror film which has more gore and more sort of...

depth into it.

WOMAN GRUNTS

And at that time, I started formulating a synopsis.

From that synopsis, I've collaborated with a creative team

which moved it into a treatment.

As preproduction went on, he started to talk about how he has...

he'd like to direct it. He's been talking to a director,

but he feels he's more inclined to direct it at the moment,

and a few weeks before we started shooting, I actually said to him,

"Look, Bashar, you seem really busy with all this other stuff you're doing,

"your business meetings and all these talks with investors, etc.

"Do you need someone else to direct it?"

"No, no, no, don't worry. I'll be ready, I'll be ready.

"I know I seem very busy right now, but on the day, I'll be ready."

And... And he wasn't.

But then later on, she says, "I know that you don't want to,"

because that relates to later when she says,

"I know you don't want to be here, I know you're a prisoner just like us,"

-and then I help her.

-And that's why I do that.

And she goes, "Maybe not," because she sees...

And then they have a whole conversation about,

they're prisoners here just like us. It actually runs through the script.

-Yeah, but they still want to escape.

-Should we just do it like that?

-We don't have time to worry about this sort of stuff.

-But they still want to escape.

On set, tension was mounting.

SHE SOBS

What are you doing now?

Bashar and Maeve stopped seeing each other and they would have little,

like, disagreements and it just made things a bit awkward sometimes.

SHE SCREAMS

Cut. Cut.

I actually did see, towards the end of filming,

Maeve have some tete-a-tetes with Aoife,

which I just took as sisterly support,

because it's tough making a movie, and...

And then, on the odd occasion,

she would go off for a little tete-a-tete with Bashar,

but in hindsight, you can speculate all you want,

but what is certainly true

is that towards the end of filming of Dissection,

there were progressively more and more little tete-a-tetes that would happen.

-Could you guys all step out of the light, please?

-Sorry.

And she was definitely worried and concerned.

The whole process just really was how not to make a film.

By the end of 2012, Bashar and Aoife had shot three feature films.

An unholy trinity.

But everyone in London works hard to get ahead.

Detectives from the British tax authority, HMRC,

had been beavering away themselves.

TRAIN HORN BLARES

So it was early November that I got this e-mail from the HMRC

and they were just telling me what Evolved and AB had been doing

with this conspiracy to defraud the Film Tax Office

and VAT fraud, and at first

I'm like, "So they evaded some tax?" What's it got to do with me?"

Because I know everyone in my film, with the exception of me, got paid,

and that it was cash, and I've got all the receipts

and invoices for the entire 84K, so I'm not seeing what's gone wrong.

Then obviously they highlighted about Landscape of Lives

and this £19.6 million budget

and it's like, well, "Obviously you helped cover the crime up."

So then they said,

"Well, if you're innocent, we need you to make a statement."

And I said, "Well, no, hang on. I know the law.

"The minute I make a statement,

"I can then not have no dealings with them."

And they said, "Why do you want to deal with them anyway,

"if they've not paid you this money?"

I said, "Cos the simple fact, I still have a film,

"it still needs to be sold, it still needs all three of our signatures,

"so I need to talk to them to sell this film,

"so once the film's sold, do what you like."

Paul Knight was very reluctant to give evidence

and we had to tread a certain path in order to get him into court.

And then out of the blue, this letter arrives

and it's from the taxman

and it turns out that they've gone back eight years of my tax records

to try and see if I hadn't paid tax

or they had something incriminating that they could bargain,

you know, "We'll oversee this if you give us the statement."

Rubbish.

Absolute rubbish. Rubbish.

Once he recognised what he would get out of being in court

and the publicity, he cooperated.

If you've done something wrong, again...

Hey, you know, you've done something wrong, you've done something wrong. We all do something wrong.

To continue to do something wrong with the same people,

it's not even you're making the same mistake with different people,

you're doing it with the same people,

you kind of deserve what's coming your way,

and that's the way I saw it in the end,

and I even tried to tell them, you know, "Get your defence in order,

"this is the evidence I'm going to be giving."

Didn't want to heed that little tip.

And obviously I said to Aoife,

who I knew was still in contact with Bashar, "Bashar pays me my money,

"perhaps my hard drive needs to be formatted

"and every e-mail and everything disappears,"

but he didn't want to pay me my money,

so it's like, "Well, you're still not showing me any loyalty,

"you're not showing me anything,

"I don't owe you anything - well, sod you."

And that's why I decided to give the statement in the end.

In the autumn of 2012, there were at that time

about 7,000 pages of evidence that had been served.

By the time we arrived at trial, we were up to about 20,000 pages,

so over the course of the autumn and January of 2013,

we served about another 13,000 pages of evidence,

so the offices were extremely busy in that final quarter of 2012.

On the eve of the trial,

both sides were confident of victory.

HMRC and their lawyers had a pile of invoices

for work that hadn't been done.

Bashar and Aoife had three feature films in the can

to prove they were bona fide film producers. Honest, guv!

INDISTINCT REPORTING

The trial was eye-opening because obviously,

HMRC had a lot more background knowledge

of what was physically happening than I ever did,

and I learned more about what the situation was,

but at that stage it was too late. I was a defendant.

I asked my legal team what was their advice,

they've been in court many times, I haven't,

and constantly their professional advice would be that,

"You don't need to prove your innocence,

"they've got to prove your guilt,

"so therefore, your best form of defence is by saying nothing

"because there's insufficient evidence

"for you to ever be convicted of this crime."

But then came the bombshell - not a blonde one this time.

Aoife Madden, you are jointly charged with Bashar Al-Issa,

Tariq Hassan, Osama Al Baghdady and Ian Sherwood

with conspiracy to cheat the revenue.

Aoife Madden, do you plead guilty or not guilty?

Guilty, your honour.

Her counsel contacted me about a week before

to say she would be pleading guilty.

I think pretty early on, she would have realised that there was no way

that the budget was of the £20 million that was being portrayed

to the British film industry, the BFI and to HMRC,

so from that point on, she lent herself fully to the conspiracy.

Come on, Tess. Help yourself out.

We've got you linked to the Zafira, it's you on the CCTV footage

and you're the one with the access to all the vehicles.

Why should we assume anyone else had anything to do with it?

Maeve was also arrested and Aoife was very concerned about her.

There were documents that were linked to Maeve.

The difficulty was, it doesn't follow because there were

documents linked to her that they were necessarily produced by her.

I was very conscious, for example, during the trial

that we relied very heavily on evidence on Skype logs,

so people communicating on Skype.

Now, one of the Skype identities, from memory,

was Maeve Madden's Skype identity. It was patent, however, that

that was in fact being used by Bashar AlIssa.

So Maeve features in the evidence

but a decision was made that

there was no reasonable prospect of conviction in relation to Maeve.

So...

If you didn't kill Hill, who did?

Aoife had thrown in the towel.

Maeve was in the clear, but there were still four men in the dock

and a couple more surprises in store.

Three of the remaining defendants decided to refuse to give evidence -

The book-keeper, Tariq Hassan,

the director of AB Productions, Osama Al Baghdady,

and architect Ian Sherwood.

I was embroiled into something, I didn't feel it was necessary

for me to ask questions of what was happening.

I was also then being sent reports,

I was being sent some filming information - again, as a layperson

to the film industry - that looked to me as if a film was being made.

Yes, OK, the question can be put to me,

why didn't I look at the size of the invoices?

But I had no reason to look at them. I wasn't a director of the company,

I was very busy trying to keep my architectural practice afloat.

Mr Sherwood was an architect of some renown in Manchester

and he agreed to have his office used and be a director of a business

that was completely and utterly fraudulent.

Even with Aoife's guilty plea, and all the evidence against him,

Bashar AlIssa might have been in with a chance.

It's notoriously hard for Her Majesty to win fraud cases

because the crime is so complicated.