Thame doctor had proceeds of fraud paid through his bank

Dr Emanuel Engmann, 56, who was forced to hand over the cash from his frozen bank accounts, had challenged Thames Valley Police’s application for the money to be forfeit under Proceeds of Crime Act rules.

The doctor, from Thame, denied knowing the money was crooked. He claimed to have got involved with a Mr Murtala and a Ms Kwami, who ran foreign exchanges in his native Ghana, in order to move funds from his bank there in order to offset his mortgage and meet school fees in the UK – where he has lived for more than two decades. He had faced difficulties transferring the funds through his bank, he said.

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Dr Engmann was said to have transferred sums in Ghanaian Cedi from his Standard Chartered account to a number of individuals and, in return, money would be paid into his UK account in sterling from various other accounts.

During a half-day hearing at Oxford Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday (March 29), he denied any knowledge of funds being the proceeds of crime or having suspicions about the arrangement by which funds were transferred into his account.

He told the court: “To be honest with you, I thought if there was anything untoward the bank would draw my attention to it.”

Cross-examined by Thames Valley Police’s barrister Edward Barham, Dr Engmann said: “For me it didn’t really ring any bells. I knew this was going through the bank and everything was above board.”

But his evidence was rejected by District Judge Kamlesh Rana, who ruled that £136,909 from five frozen bank accounts should be forfeit under Proceeds of Crime Act rules.

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In her judgment, she said: “I find it was difficult for Dr Engmann to accept responsibility for his actions here both in the interview and before me today. He was seeking to lay the blame on others for his lack of understanding or his lack of time.”

She said: “I found his evidence has been unconvincing and implausible. I do not accept the explanation that he has given.

“I find that Dr Engmann was keen to secure the transfer of his money in Ghana to the UK and the only issue he was concerned with was getting a competitive exchange rate.”

There was no suggestion that Dr Engmann was involved in the fraud from which the criminally-acquired cash was derived.

A series of messages between him and a Mr Murtala, to whom he was said to have been introduced by someone who worked for the bank, were put to the doctor at Wednesday’s hearing.

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In one message he appeared to ask Mr Murtala if he could pay money into another bank account ‘so I don’t get too many questions from the bank’.

“Were you trying to evade any questions from the bank?” Mr Barham, for the police, asked.

He replied: “I wasn’t trying to evade any questions from the bank.” He said the bank had previously asked him ‘just a couple of questions’, but these did not prompt him to make ‘further investigations’ of Mr Murtala.

He wondered whether another message to Mr Murtala, in which he suggested that an account with a different email and home address should be used, contained a typographical error.

Mr Barham said: “The question is why didn’t you want them to be the same? Why do you want all the records not to show the same details?”

Dr Engmann replied: “Well, I think it should really say ‘could you also provide the email address and home address for this new account?’”

Asked about the movement of funds between various UK bank accounts held in his name, he said he ‘always’ moved money around his accounts and raised concerns about only being able to recover up to £85,000 under the deposit guarantee scheme if the bank were to collapse.