R v Shahnawaz Fiaz

A serious fraud sentence may exceed the guideline starting point and may lie just above the guideline range where the offending’s culpability and impact justify that result, subject to the statutory maximum. The sentence will stand on appeal unless manifestly excessive. Where both delay and guilty plea credit apply, the delay adjustment should be made first.

Where an offence predates an earlier sentence, totality requires a structured discretion. The court must consider all the circumstances, including the timing and similarity of the offending, any opportunity to disclose it, and whether joint consecutive sentences would have required adjustment. Failure to clean the slate may reduce the allowance, but does not necessarily eliminate it.

The appellant pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud and was sentenced by the Crown Court at Liverpool to 6 years 9 months’ imprisonment, with a concurrent 6-month sentence for failure to surrender under section 6(1) of the Bail Act 1976. He appealed against sentence with limited leave.

The fraud followed an earlier conspiracy to defraud for which the appellant had received a 56-month sentence at the Crown Court at Bolton in February 2018. The grounds were that the uplift from the guideline starting point was excessive and that the sentence should have been reduced to reflect totality, because the index offending predated the earlier sentence. The court also considered the proper order for applying delay and guilty plea reductions.

1. Guideline sentence. The Mansouri fraud involved six of the seven high culpability factors in the fraud guideline, substantial financial harm, many victims and additional high-impact harm. A substantial uplift from the 7-year category 1A starting point was therefore justified. The statutory maximum was 10 years and the guideline range extended to 8 years. After correcting the order of the reductions, the notional trial sentence was effectively 8 years 2 months. That was a stiff but justified sentence and was not manifestly excessive.
2. Order of reductions. The adjustment for significant delay should be made before credit for the guilty plea. The court therefore treated the 9-year sentence as reduced by 10 months for delay before applying the 15 per cent guilty plea credit.
3. Totality and an earlier sentence. The totality guidance applied even though the earlier sentence had expired and the new sentence was not formally consecutive. After fixing the appropriate sentence for the offences being sentenced, the court had a discretion whether to make a further allowance for the earlier sentence. All the circumstances had to be considered. It was not a mechanical exercise of calculating a hypothetical sentence for all offences together and deducting the earlier sentence.
4. Application of the factors. The absence of temporal overlap and the appellant’s failure to disclose the continuing fraud when prosecuted for the earlier fraud militated against a substantial reduction. The seven-year gap, largely attributable to prosecutorial delay, the close similarity of the offending, and the fact that joint consecutive sentences would have required downward adjustment favoured a meaningful reduction. The failure to clean the slate was powerful, but did not justify refusing any allowance. The fact that the new fraud was committed on bail was already an aggravating feature and could not justify refusing totality relief altogether.
5. Order. The appeal was allowed to that extent only. The sentence of 6 years 9 months was quashed and a sentence of 6 years was substituted. Under section 327(3) of the Sentencing Act 2020, the court specified 69 days spent in custody awaiting extradition.

• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) — allowed the appeal against sentence to the limited extent described, quashed the sentence of 6 years 9 months and substituted 6 years.
• Crown Court at Liverpool — sentenced the appellant on 5 February 2025, following his guilty plea to conspiracy to defraud, to 6 years 9 months’ imprisonment, with a concurrent 6-month sentence for failure to surrender.