R v Hossein Tahmasebi

When sentencing criminal-property offending alongside a related substantive offence, the court must identify any additional culpability or harm. Separate and more sophisticated laundering, involving different criminal property or a different period, may justify a consecutive sentence. The overall sentence must nevertheless comply with totality and must not be manifestly excessive.

An appellate court cannot correct an omitted mandatory surcharge where doing so would deal with the appellant more severely than the court below, because section 11(3) of the Criminal Appeal Act 1978 prevents that course.

The appellant was convicted in the Crown Court at Birmingham of converting, using or controlling, and possessing criminal property, and of possessing class A drugs with intent to supply. The criminal-property offending included substantial cash deposits, cash found at his home and cash collected in Birmingham. Police also found 1.689 kilograms of crystal meth at his address.

He received concurrent sentences for two criminal-property counts, a four-year consecutive sentence for converting criminal property, and six years for the drugs offence, making ten years in total. With the leave of the Full Court, he appealed only on the basis that consecutive sentences produced a manifestly excessive total sentence.

The central issue was whether the sentencing judge had properly applied totality where the criminal-property offending was said to relate to the drugs offence.

1. Appeal dismissed. The ten-year total sentence was not manifestly excessive. The sentencing judge had made an appropriate reduction to reflect totality before imposing consecutive sentences for the principal criminal-property and drugs offences.
2. R v Cooper, Park, Fletcher [2023] EWCA Crim 945 confirms that, where criminal-property and related substantive offences are sentenced together, the essential task is to identify the extent of any additional culpability or harm in the criminal-property offending. Here, the deposits represented the proceeds of serious drug dealing and involved additional planning and sophistication. They also increased the risk of frustrated confiscation proceedings, concerned additional or different criminal property, and extended over a different period. The laundering was therefore clearly separate from the drugs offence.
3. The individual sentences were not challenged. The judge had imposed concurrent sentences for the less serious criminal-property counts and reduced the sentences otherwise justified on the principal criminal-property and drugs counts before making them consecutive. A concurrent approach would instead have required a substantial upward adjustment to the drugs sentence to reflect all the criminality.
4. The court noted that the judge had omitted the mandatory surcharge required by section 42 of the Sentencing Act 2020. Section 11(3) of the Criminal Appeal Act 1978 prevented the Court of Appeal from imposing it, since that would deal more severely with the appellant than the Crown Court had done. Following R v Jones [2018] EWCA Crim 2994, the court directed that the lower-court record reflect the surcharge that should have been imposed.

• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division): appeal against sentence dismissed in [2024] EWCA Crim 222.
• Crown Court at Birmingham: on 30 March 2023 the appellant was convicted of three criminal-property offences and possession of a class A drug with intent to supply. On 31 March 2023 he received a total sentence of ten years’ imprisonment.