Extra 22 months in jail for DVD conman
An accountant ordered to pay back £110,200 after running a counterfeit goods racket from his Wolverhampton home has been jailed for an extra 22 months after failing to pay any of it.
Zimbabwe-born Webster Kutsawa was originally jailed for 20 months for the operation that generated hundreds of thousands of pounds of business from his home.
And in August this year he was told to pay back more than £110,000 after a Proceeds of Crime hearing took place.
But he was back in the dock at Birmingham Magistrates Court yesterday, where District Judge Shamim Qureshi said he had no other option but to give a prison sentence.
Kutsawa, aged 42, told the court: "I want to pay the money back. I do not have the money. I'm still paying for this mistake I have made in my life."
But Mr Qureshi told him: "You don't have the money to pay. I'm going to activate the 22-month sentence."
Kutsawa ran a counterfeit goods racket that generated hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of business from his three-bedroom house in the city.
He launched a firm dealing with 6,500 fake DVDs a month from China, and also sold bogus Slendertone slimming aids.
Kutsawa, who has a Masters degree in Business Administration, sold the counterfeit goods as genuine items via the internet. Trading Standards officers at Wolverhampton City Council launched an investigation into him after complaints about the poor quality of the fakes.
The scam came crashing down after BBC Worldwide discovered that a fake Doctor Who DVD was in circulation through a firm called Egudo, based in Glengarry Gardens, Finchfield.
When Trading Standards raided the address, rented by Kutsawa, in March 2010, they found two of the bedrooms were packed with 3,434 separate DVDs. The haul would have netted a £82,771 profit for father-of-three Kutsawa. Investigators believe that represented a month's worth of business.
