Well, on Thursday 13 May 2021 at Folkestone Magistrates' Court, Kent Police advised the court that they wished to withdraw their forfeiture application and asked the magistrates to dismiss the application and order them to return the money!

And this young couple have now had their £31,840 returned to them.

The court refused an application by the couple for their legal costs but did award them £100 towards their wasted costs of a barrister who attended a previous court hearing only to find that the hearing had been moved to the day before.

I will provide a further update in the next week or two.

Many, many thanks for your support in this case.

A Freedom of Information response reveals the staggering statistic that Kent Police did not convict anyone of Money Laundering, Bribery or Fraud during 2018, 2019 or 2020. But Kent Police still managed to succeed in 145 out of 146 forfeiture applications (which this young couple are facing) in 2020, and retained almost £900,000 that they had seized.

 See https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/convictions_for_financial_crime#incoming-1705942 for the full details.

Now more than ever we need your support to ensure that the young couple whose money has been seized are able to properly defend themselves in the Magistrates Court and to get their money back.

Please SHARE the link to this campaign as widely as you can so that we reach the target by Wednesday. Thanks

We are a young, hard-working couple in our 20’s. We worked very hard over a 2-year period to save £32,000 so that we could start to build a house of our own, for ourselves and our 2 cats.

On our way home, we were stopped at Eurotunnel and arrested for money laundering.

After being detained for 12 hours, we were kicked out of Margate police station in the early hours of a May morning with nothing - no coat, no jacket and with just 50p and a rail travel warrant in our pockets. We were told by Kent Police that we could wait in a pub until morning!! Our phones, our clothes, our cats and our car had all been confiscated by Kent Police and we had no way of contacting anybody.

The Investigating Officer told us not to go to the hearing the next day and would not let us wait in the police station until the morning.

As we were wandering around Margate waiting for the station to open and trying to keep warm, a passing minicab driver took pity on us and agreed to drive us back to London where my mother allowed us to stay with her until we managed to arrange to start work again and were able to find somewhere of our own to stay.

After 6 months all charges were dropped when Kent Police checked out our story and found that what we had said (that all money was earned from our jobs) was true and that the money was clean

We retained lawyers to help prove we were innocent, but this has used up over £10,000 that we do not really have.

Our lives have been on hold for the last 2 years, waiting to know why Kent Police will not return our money to us.

Can you please help us to get our money back and obtain some measure of justice?

PLEDGE and SHARE

After what seemed like a very long wait over the Christmas / New Year period, I was finally able to launch our 2021 Crowd Justice fund raiser.

And within just hours of launch at 5pm on 4th January 2021 when tweets, facebook messages and a Linkedin article were still being posted and written, 9 generous people had already pledged £225 towards the target of £6,000.

Thank you so much to the early contributors who took the lead in this.

As always the ask is for a small donation of £5 or £10, or whatever your financial situation allows (and yes, Mark, your pledge of £80 is absolutely fantastic! thank you so much). If you cannot afford a small pledge then you could do your part in supporting this couple by spreading the word to family and friends. You never know, one of them might have a small amount to spare that they could commit to helping right a clear wrong.

For now, wishing you all a Happy New Year. Will keep you all updated with the campaign progress and many thanks for the support, It IS appreciated.