Perhaps the strangest thing about the trial of eight men and one woman for conspiring to supply counterfeit medicines was that some of them only met each other for the first time in the dock of Kingston Crown Court.
As this lengthy trial developed from the scheduled 12 weeks to a shade under nine months the defendants of what the prosecution alleged to be a global conspiracy got to know each other “quite well”.
They were often seen chatting merrily to each other both in the dock and outside the courtroom.
These new friendships were formed during a case which was rooted in the backstreet factories of China, India and Pakistan where counterfeit medicines, rip-offs of household western names, such as Pfizer’s Viagra or Eli Lilly’s Cialis are produced illegally and in huge quantities.
UK raids
Gary Haywood was the link between these factories and his co-conspirators.
It was the chance interception by UK customs officers of a parcel containing 12,000 fake Viagra tablets and addressed to Haywood that eventually led to a series of raids in London and Leicestershire and criminal charges against the nine defendants in this trial.
The prosecution case alleged a sophisticated network whereby the counterfeit medicines were repackaged as they were shipped by courier from one country to another and the accused passed details of orders and shipments to each other by e-mail.
This use of modern technology allowed members of the conspiracy to keep at arms-length from each other.
A complicated trail of paperwork and computer documents was alleged to show how the defendants attempted to cover-up their tracks and their multi-million pound profits.
Aladdin’s cave
The scale of the counterfeiting was exposed when Haywood subsequently boasted to undercover investigators that “within 6-8 weeks I will be able to supply up to a million tablets”.
At the same time he was supplying Ashish Halai, the lynchpin of the operation, with thousands upon thousands of pills to ship abroad.
The Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) duly raided Haywood’s Leicestershire home and found what they have described as an “Aladdin’s cave of fake medicines” worth over £1.5m.
Haywood was found guilty of all 11 counts against him including two of money laundering.
The bulk of the pills were sold online to both wholesale and retail customers, primarily in the US and the Bahamas.
The five who were convicted were ultimately relying on the embarrassment of individuals at obtaining the prescriptions they needed by conventional means to make themselves vast financial rewards.