In the early part of the millennium, Arif Patel appeared to be a businessman very much on the up.
His company, Faisaltex, headquartered in his home city of Preston, was known for manufacturing textiles, such as socks and nighties, which it supplied to retailers.
Patel was a fixture in the Sunday Times Rich List with his wealth in 2006 estimated to be £105m. He was also investing heavily in property across the city and beyond.
In 2007, his teenage son bought a minority stake in Preston North End Football Club. There was even a plan to build a £100m, 19-storey tower block – complete with botanical gardens and restaurant – in the centre of the city.
Behind the facade, though, something very different was going on.
In the early 2000s, organised crime groups had turned to large-scale attacks on the tax system through what became known as carousel fraud.
Chains of fake business transactions are created as a way of stealing VAT repayments from HMRC.
Goods move between different companies, into and out of the country, to generate false tax refunds.
The same shipments of goods are often moved around repeatedly, hence the name carousel fraud.
This type of fraud was costing taxpayers billions of pounds a year and experts like Stone were at the vanguard of the fightback.
This is how Patel’s textiles empire appeared on his radar.
“When we started to look at them we did notice some very strange shipments of goods – a container load of hats to Switzerland seemed odd because they were actually Swiss hats,” he said.