A crooked car dealer who was caught with a fleet of luxury stolen vehicles in his basement has been ordered to pay back more than £1.3 million.
Chirag Patel, 40, was jailed for eight years last October after the discovery of his “off the books” car rental business, hiring out Range Rovers, Mercedes, and a Porsche Cayenne to his associates and friends.
The vehicles had been stolen over the course of three years, and Patel gave them new identities with fake numberplates and registration documents from vehicles which had been crashed and written-off.
Patel was caught out after calling the police himself to report his Porsche stolen, and officers then discovered the array of cars in the basement car park under his home in Croydon.
He was back at Croydon crown court on Friday when he was ordered to pay back £1,369,661 in proceeds of crime or face an extra ten years in prison.
Patel was found guilty following a trial of conspiracy to handle stolen goods over 19 luxury vehicles taken between October 2012 and January 2015 and nine car keys stolen from Jaguar Land Rover’s plant in Solihull, West Midlands.
He was also convicted of money laundering over more than £530,000 of unexplained cash deposits into three bank accounts in his name.
When officers from the Serious Acquisitive Crime Unit in Croydon raided Patel’s home they also found 26 sets of car keys, a list of vehicles and registrations, equipment for accessing on-board computers in cars, and a cache of mobile phones, tablets and laptops.
Police recovered stolen vehicles worth £728,000 which Patel had used for his illegal car rental business and stored at homes owned by himself and his family.
