Environment Agency | A Birmingham-based director and his company have been ordered to pay a Proceeds of Crime confiscation order, fines and costs totalling £476,995 for breaches of the Fraud Act 2006.
This follows an Environment Agency investigation into fraudulent entry of waste packaging data.
At Birmingham Crown Court, Shaobo Qin, a director of EDU Case Ltd, pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation. He was given a two-year prison sentence suspended for 18 months.
Qin, age 42, of Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, was also ordered to pay a Proceeds of Crime confiscation order of £255,057. He must pay within two months or face three years in prison.
He was also disqualified as a director for four years and ordered to do 200 hours of unpaid work.
His company, EDU Case Ltd of Portway Road, Rowley Regis, was fined £200,000. The Environment Agency were also awarded £21,995 in investigation costs.
The court was told Qin’s company was a plastics and recycling exports enterprise. The offences were discovered by the Environment Agency towards the end of 2022.
The company, orchestrated by Qin, was deliberately and systematically entering false data on to the Environment Agency’s National Packaging Waste Database (NPWD) for non-existent waste exports.
This resulted in Qin receiving a benefit for himself and his company in the sum of approx. £255,000. He was arrested on 10 January 2024, where he was interviewed by Environment Agency officers.
EDU Case were accredited to carry out plastic packaging exports and able to issue “evidence” of that activity in the form of tonnage figures on the database.
This evidence could be bought by businesses who are obliged to account for their plastic packaging waste under the Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations 2007.
An audit conducted by Environment Agency officers in 2023 and information following that work identified discrepancies between the amount of waste exported and the amount of evidence issued.
The false entries represented nearly two-thirds of the business’ entire trade in 2022 towards the end of that year.
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