Following raids and ten arrests yesterday, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is charging nine people with cheating the public revenue.

Three people are also being charged with money laundering offences.

The nine are: Curtis Laurent (49) of Cardiff, Marcus Hughes (36) of Uttoxeter, Keith Bennett(46) of Beaconsfield, Hashib Apabhai (45) of Bedworth, Mohammed Novsarka (46) of Warwickshire, Peter Ebbrell (56) of Coventry, Keith Ponder (56) of Beaconsfield, Amir Naghibossadat (36) of London, and Sampson Goldstone (31) of Cheshire.

Apabhai, Novsarka, and Goldstone were also charged with money laundering offences. A 37-year-old woman was also arrested late yesterday.

The arrests yesterday followed the largest ever Customs action back in 2003 when 92 addresses in the UK and Spain were raided and 42 people arrested. The raids resulted in the collection of half a million pages of documents and 28 terabytes of information from computers. ®

• HMRC arrests 10 carousel fraud suspects (2 July 2007)
• 'Brown should rethink EU proposal on VAT' (31 May 2007)
• HMRC claims IT successes (18 May 2007)
• HMRC pushes online tax filing (5 April 2007)
• HMRC gets new tool to battle VAT fraud (19 March 2007)
• Bigger small firms to benefit from new VAT rules (12 February 2007)
• Customs arrests 10 alleged VAT-fraudsters (6 February 2007)
• Record sentence for VAT fraudster (9 January 2007)