Eight face jail for £20m fake coins and notes racket

The group, which includes four men from Yorkshire and another from North East Lincolnshire, are to be sentenced later this week for passing on counterfeit cash which was distributed across the region and beyond.

The enterprise has been linked to the production of hundreds of thousands of fake 20 and 50 euro notes and is believed to be one of the largest counterfeit money operations ever investigated by South Yorkshire Police.

One member of the group made fake 2 and 1 coins and another spray-painted them to make them look more realistic.

In the dock at Sheffield Crown Court are Malcolm Moate, 56, of Lansdowne Close, Thurnscoe, Barnsley; Derrick Davies, 46, of Grove Road, Attleborough, Norfolk; Peter Edwards, 57, of Pickard Street, London; Yasin Patel, 45, of Glenfield Close, Blackburn; Michael Maddon, 66, of Beckett Street, Burmantofts, Leeds; Norman Oliver, 62, of Goole; Terence Quinn, 59, of Brigsley House, Immingham; and Michael Kinghorn, 63, of Stafford Street, Barnsley.

All eight have pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiring to pass counterfeit notes and coins between September 16, 2008 and September 12 last year.

Patel has also pleaded guilty to two counts relating to the manufacture of counterfeit coins and Davies has admitted having a false passport and making a false statement in order to obtain it.

Police recovered fake notes worth about 300,000 but more were in circulation. More than 6,000 fake 2 coins and more than 1,000 counterfeit 1 coins were also recovered, bringing the total face value of the confiscated currency to about 315,000.

Prosecutor Richard Clews said that all of the counterfeit 20 notes recovered in the case had the same serial number.

He added that more than 700,000 counterfeit notes with that serial number, with a combined face value of more than 15m, were known to have been in circulation since March 2008.

Operation Merge was led by South Yorkshire Police and its senior investigating officer Detective Inspector Martin Locking, but also involved officers from Humberside, West Yorkshire, Lancashire, Norfolk and the Serious Organised Crime Agency.