Former professional footballer jailed over £400,000 money laundering handover
A former professional footballer, about 400,000 £ penalty to launder money was imprisoned for trying to launder money.
33 -year -old James Keatings transferred penalties to a street in Wishaw, North Lanarkshire on June 28 last year.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) saw that he had moved to another minibus that carried two boxes of the old forward, white transit minibus to another minibus.
When the second minibus was stopped by the police, the boxes were found to contain 78 bunch of grades worth £ 390.040.
A judicial study of money and boxes found that Keatings’ fingerprints were in a series of areas including elastic bands that hold money, boxes and notes together.
Among the former clubs of Keatings was a part of the Hibernian team, which won the Scottish Cup in 2016, Celtic, Hearts, St Johnstone and Dundee United.
On August 20, at the Falkirk Sharif Court, he was found guilty of a crime under the 2002 Crime Revenue Law.
He was sentenced to 13 and a half months in prison on Friday.
Şerif Christopher Shead, who delivered his sentence, said his custody was the only appropriate sentence given the nature of his crime.
“(Keatings’s defense lawyer) Tony Graham KC is aware that it is important features of alleviating in this case,” he said.
“But I regret it, I concluded that the crime was the only elimination of gravity.”
Keatings, who appeared in court wearing a black pants and a black hill, did not react when the sentence was delivered.
Previously, Keating’s lawyer told the court that his client agreed to move the money in exchange for painkillers because he was “chronic pain ından from a long -term hip injury that prevented the second stages of his football career.
He said that his client was initially given “various prescribed painkillers ,, but when he proved that they were inadequate, he began to provide illegal analgesics in the amounts that allow him to give himself medication”.
He explained: “An opportunity to be paid in the medicine, as the realization of a service moves and made it duly made it in accordance with the money.”
Mr. Graham acknowledged that this was a “very important money ,, but Keatings said that it was only a limited participation with him.
“His only participation is the man who really handled the money and many people who transfer the money,” he said.
“There is no title of money. It was someone else’s money”.
NCA Regional Investigation Chairman Ian Thomas, who commented after the prisoners, said: “James Keatings moved to hundreds of thousands of pounds in suspicious penalties, but what he did not know was watching every movement of OCP officers.
“NCA will continue to work closely with our law enforcement partners to bring criminals such as Keatings to justice and disrupt their guilty.”
The detective Chief Inspector Laura Sands said from the Unit of Terrorism against organized crime and counter -terrorism: “This investigation underlines our commitment to the serious organized crime force and the country’s serious organized crime strategy.
“We will continue to work with our common agencies to cope with such criminal activities and to confront justice of those responsible.
Orum I am vital for our information and support studies from the public and encourage everyone who has information about organized crime to contact us through 101. ”
