A WANSTEAD greengrocer has been jailed for nearly three years after fiddling almost £1.2 million from the taxman.

Mohammed Razak of Elmcroft Avenue spent five years hiding half his takings from the Inland Revenue by pretending his shop was operating only one till.

Suspicious revenue inspectors called at his shop, Ambrosia', in Queen's Market, Upton Park, just as Razak was running out of the door with a black bin liner stuffed with wads of cash and two accounts books.

Sentencing Razak, 45, at Southwark crown court, judge Christopher Elwen told him: "Those who put money out of the reach of the Revenue over a period of time must expect not only to repay the tax and pay the financial penalty but also to go to prison."

Inspectors followed the trail to a bureau de change called the Kaz Money Exchange (KME) run by a friend of Razak's, Sabir Kamzi. The £59 million business, had branches from London to Glasgow, and regularly channelled Razak's assets to an unknown foreign destination.

Razak admitted to cheating the taxman of £1,173,456 between January 1999 and December 2003 and was jailed for two years and nine months.

KME itself was found to have an unaccounted shortfall of £5.9 million and Kamzi was arrested along with his son Irfan who claimed he pressurised into fiddling the books for his father.

Irfan Kazmi was found guilty of four offences of false accounting and was locked up for 15 months. His father, who claimed he was too ill to stand trial, was found guilty in his absence of four similar charges. He was given an 18 month supervision order and told to pay full defence costs.

Despite playing a more major role in the conspiracy than his son, the judge ruled it was not appropriate to impose a custodial sentence given the defendant's serious mental and physical health problems.