THE driving force behind the Bradford-based food brand Mumtaz was today found guilty of a £100,000 fraud.
Gul-Nawaz Khan Akbar was handed a nine month prison sentence, suspended for a year, and ordered to pay £34,000 costs after a jury took less than an hour to find him guilty of using fraudulent invoices to help secure a grant from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.
The grant had been offered to the company to build a new £5 million factory in Legrams Lane.
Unable to meet a deadline of late December 2011 to provide paperwork to secure the loan, he provided fabricated invoices.
The grant never happened, but the factory was still built.
Sentencing Khan Akbar, the judge, Recorder Anthony Hawks, said it was an "unusual" and "in some ways very unfortunate case".
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