Brothers jailed for printing counterfeit banknotes

Apparently respectable businessmen Amrit and Prem Karra acted as “masterminds and architects” of the highly-sophisticated counterfeiting operation, Birmingham Crown Court heard.

Sentencing the brothers and two other men who also took part in the scam, Judge Richard Bond said such offences undermined the integrity of the UK’s financial system.

The Karra brothers and their brothers-in-law, Rajiv Kumar and Yash Mahey, were all convicted of conspiracy to produce counterfeit notes following a five-week trial.

The trial heard Amrit Karra and Prem Karra, both of Walsall, Kumar, from West Bromwich; and Mahey, of Handsworth, Birmingham, even worked through the night to print fake £10 notes with a face value of at least £1.27m.

Amrit Karra, 45, Prem Karra, 43, Kumar, 40, and Mahey, 44, used specialist paper, inks and foil to run off the near-perfect forgeries at a print-works in Hockley, Birmingham.

Judge Bond told the men, who are all married with children: “People who commit offences of this type must realise that those who counterfeit currency must expect long sentences of imprisonment.

“In this case the amount of money produced and disseminated into general circulation was enormous.

“Production of counterfeit notes undermines the whole economy of the country... essentially it undermines the whole integrity of the currency system.”

Jailing both Mahey and Kumar for four-and-a-half years, and barring the Karra brothers from acting as company directors, Judge Bond said the offences were motivated by greed.

The National Crime Agency said Karra Design and Print had legitimate business contracts but the four men had used the firm’s computers and machinery to counterfeit notes in late 2010 and early 2011.

The vast majority of the “extremely high quality” notes even had individual serial numbers, and were only identified as fakes as they were sorted by banks to be loaded into cash machines.

Lawyers for the Karra brothers argued that the conspiracy was a response to financial trouble at the printing firm.