THE "driving force" behind the Mumtaz brand has gone on trial accused of fraudulently attempting to claim a £100,000 business grant from the Government to get a new £5m food factory and headquarters development off the ground.

Gul-Nawaz Khan Akbar's application on behalf of Mumtaz Food Products had been accepted for the business investment grant by Yorkshire Forward, but he needed to prove a total of £1.1m of capital had been invested in the project before the state funding could be released.

A jury at Bradford Crown Court yesterday heard the prosecution's case that, as the deadline approached and the project was beset with delays, Akbar resorted to fabricating invoices and creating an accountancy trail to "preserve his position" in a bid to claim the money.

Jonathan Ashley-Norman, prosecuting, said: "It is not the position that when the application was made it was made with any fraudulent intent.

"It is when the claim was actually sought that Mr Akbar resorted to fraud."

He said that four invoices purporting to be from Kelvic Development Limited had been hand-delivered to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in Leeds shortly before the December 31 deadline in 2011, along with an audit check by accountants as well as the claim form signed by Akbar. This was designed to prove that Mumtaz Food Products had paid out the required amount for work done on the factory development at Legrams Lane.

When BIS officers handling the grant application visited the development site three months later, no work appeared to have been carried out, despite the apparent payments for work completed. Upon investigation it emerged that Kelvic had actually been in the process of going into liquidation at the time of the invoices, the court was told.

Mr Ashley-Norman explained that Mumtaz Food Industries, another arm of the Mumtaz empire, had previously had some dealings with Kelvic Holdings in 2008, and that is how Akbar would have been in possession of Kelvic invoices.

"These Kelvic invoices were all false, and their submission was all fraud," Mr Ashley-Norman said.

He added that Akbar had created a "money-go-round" feeding a Mumtaz bank account and effectively writing cheques from one Mumtaz account to another.

Later Akbar, 54, of Legrams Lane, Listerhills, who denies the fraud by misrepresentation charges, claimed he had told BIS staff that the invoices were dummies rather than the real thing so they could be submitted before the deadline, something both officers involved in the application denied any knowledge of.

Mr Ashley-Norman added: "He resorted to dishonest steps to preserve his position, fearing the loss of this grant."

Perhaps he thought that by the time his deception was discovered the new contractors would have done enough to allow him to maintain the work had been done earlier, or he may simply have believed he could "talk his way out of it", he added.

The trial continues.