The Case

In the instant case, where the offenders were involved over a number of years in a number of conspiracies to obtain property by deception, having defrauded elderly and vulnerable people into paying excessive amounts for unnecessary work, sometimes not even performed, to their properties, and involving 26victims and over 600,000 having been obtained, and where in one case the offenders 'conned' a victim out of 500,000 under the guise of friendship, leaving him destitute, the judge had wrongly felt constrained in sentencing the offenders by the statutory maximum sentence of ten years' imprisonment. Given its unusual features, it was plainly a case in which the court was able to consider consecutive sentences which could have resulted in a total sentence which exceeded the statutory maximum for a single offence, and in order to afford credit for mitigation and guilty pleas, discounting one of the sentences so that the total sentence was the 'statutory maximum' of ten years.