Husband and wife music pirates jailed for £5m fraud

A husband and wife team who ran a music pirating racket which made more than £5 million have been jailed after a major police operation.

Gang leader Farhat Nissa, 35, and her husband Mohammed Shaikh, 38, of Finchley were convicted of one of the biggest ever frauds on the music industry after a year-long international investigation.

The gang imported hundreds of thousands of music compilation disc sets into the UK after they were produced to order by factories in the Czech Republic.

Artists pirated included Usher, 50 Cent and Mariah Carey. Nissa used her respected music CD brokerage SFH Ltd - one of the largest in Britain - as a front for the crime.

She was jailed for four and a half years after being found guilty of conspiracy to defraud the music industry at a trial at Snaresbrook crown court. Shaikh was jailed for 12 months for attempting to pervert the course of justice.

A third gang member, market trader Wasim Mir, 37, from Ilford, ordered the compilation CDs from Hatfield-based SFH and supplied market stalls and shops across the South-East. He was jailed for two and a half years.

Nissa and Shaikh also copied compilations onto CDs at their home after Mir was arrested in October 2005, costing the music industry a further £30,000.

Judge Inigo Bing said the conspiracy was "organised and extremely efficient".

A total of 2,000 counterfeit discs were seized by officials from the British Phonographic Industry. Another 35,000 illegal CDs were recovered from a warehouse in east London.