Corrupt lawyer must repay over £800,000

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has made an £880,166 confiscation order against a lawyer who delayed criminal proceedings by falsifying evidence of police corruption to protect a criminal network which sold heroin and used firearms.
Corrupt lawyer, Naveen Sagar, was sentenced in December 2007 to 14-and-a-half years imprisonment for his part in helping a London criminal network evade sentencing.
Sagar was an integral part of the gang. Abusing his position as a criminal solicitor at Mehra and Co, Sagar attempted to undermine police investigations being conducted through elaborate delaying tactics.
During investigation, Sagar recorded conversations between officers negotiating with a man claiming he was going to provide evidence against the gang. He then edited the content in an attempt to present the police as being corrupt.
Operation Pauldings, run by the SCD7 Central Task Force of the MPS, was set up in late 2004 to target the criminal network supplying Class A drugs. Officers from SCD7 conducted a financial investigation under the Proceeds of Crime Act to recover assets from Sagar. Mehra and Co has now closed and ceased trading.
If he fails to pay off £444,488 of the order within 12 months, Sagar will have to serve a three-year sentence. He has also been ordered to pay £24,386 in compensation in relation to the fraud against the Legal Services Commission and £18,518 to the victim of the burglary he committed against his parents shop a week after they sold it.
Detective Chief Inspector Peter Beyer, from the MPS’ Central Task Force, said: “Sagar was an integral part in the running of a criminal network that supplied drugs on a large scale and guns. Such was their grip on the criminal network they could coerce others to make themselves vulnerable to police action in order to protect the gang’s activity.
“Sagar’s relative inexperience as a criminal lawyer did not prevent him concocting elaborate plans to try to undermine the integrity of our investigations. When he was invited to join a law firm, his ingrained criminality ensured his partner was drawn into the same world.”
Operation Pauldings resulted in 35 arrests and nine convictions. It also recovered:
•Four kilos of heroin.
•280 rocks of crack cocaine.
•Two Mac10 machine pistols.
•Five semi-automatic handguns.
•One Brocock revolver.
•67 rounds of ammunition, and £300,000 in cash.
Other affiliated investigations linked to Pauldings have recovered a further ten kilos of cocaine, four handguns and ammunition.