A former Labour MP and justice minister has been discovered not responsible of fees round his position in a fraudulent Covid-19 testing firm.
Shahid Malik, 58, was MP for Dewsbury between 2005 and 2010 and served as a minister in three departments in Gordon Brown’s authorities.
Malik was one among 5 individuals charged with offences referring to RT Diagnostics, an organization that prosecutors mentioned was a “money cow” set as much as benefit from the UK authorities’s increasing test-and-trace system in March 2021.
On Thursday, Malik was discovered not responsible of fraudulent buying and selling, inflicting a public nuisance and cash laundering in a trial at Bradford crown court docket, which was, unusually, performed with no jury.
The trial started in October final 12 months and jurors had been despatched out to start out their deliberations in March. In April, they had been discharged by Choose Smith after an allegation of jury tampering.
Smith took the choice to proceed the trial with out the jury, and that he would resolve on the verdicts.
The court docket heard that Malik began the enterprise with the pharmacist and former Labour councillor Faisal Shoukat, 39, when the third nationwide lockdown was ending in March 2021.
Shoukat was discovered responsible of all three offences.
Paul Moore, 57, who had a senior position in RT Diagnostics and was Malik’s workplace supervisor when he was an MP, was cleared of inflicting a public nuisance and of fraudulent buying and selling.
Lynn Connell, 64, a supervisor on the firm, and Alexander Zarneh, 70, who was its scientific director, had been additionally cleared of the identical two offences.
Prosecutors mentioned RT Diagnostics, which made £6.67m in three weeks, was arrange in “shoddy and insufficient premises” in Halifax and gave out false unfavorable outcomes to clients.
The defence barrister, Jonathan Laidlaw KC, mentioned Malik’s position within the enterprise had been “very restricted certainly” and he had acted as “a facilitator – placing the cash up and making introductions”.
Giving his closing speech to jurors in March, Laidlaw mentioned Malik by no means went to the premises when it was in operation.
He instructed the court docket that for more often than not the enterprise was working, Malik was overseas and there was no proof he was instructed about any of its points whereas he was overseas.
Laidlaw mentioned the truth that the previous MP had made cash from RT Diagnostics “can’t presumably be the idea for a responsible verdict”.
The court docket heard that because the third nationwide lockdown was ending in March 2021, the federal government was trying to increase its test-and-trace system by growing the variety of laboratories providing PCR testing.
The defendants had been accused of “taking benefit” of that course of with an “insufficient and non-compliant” testing firm which, prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford KC mentioned, “generated a suspiciously low variety of constructive outcomes”.
Sandiford mentioned the Halifax laboratory was arrange in insufficient premises with holes within the partitions and ceilings, and garbage strewn round.
Jurors heard that the corporate employed “quite a few younger individuals who had little or no coaching within the dealing with of Covid-19 samples” and set them to work with no social distancing and no private protecting gear.
Malik and Sadiq Khan, now London mayor, had been the primary British-born Muslims to develop into MPs, and Malik was the primary to develop into a authorities minister.
He was appointed as a world improvement minister in 2007 and he later had ministerial jobs on the Division of Justice and the Division for Communities and Native Authorities.
