The Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office appealed by way of case stated from a decision of the Crown Court to extend by four months the time limit available to pay a confiscation order made under section 71 of the 1988 Act. The question was whether the Crown Court had jurisdiction to vary or extend the time to pay outside the 28 day slip rule period.
Held: It did not. The appeal was allowed and the order extending time to pay was quashed. The Prosecutions Office had put forward written submissions including this: ‘If here the respondent needed an extension of time to pay, the proper course, leaving aside any appeal to the Court of Appeal Criminal Division, was to apply to the Magistrates who have both the requisite powers of enforcement and dispensing powers to do justice in the individual case (see section 76 and section 77 of the Magistrates Courts Act).’ The Court said: ‘The reality of the confiscation order is that it is to pay a given amount within a given period or face a sentence of imprisonment in default. The given period of time to pay is an integral part of the order … The right answer was for the respondent to seek to persuade the Magistrates in the exercise of their discretion, not then to activate the default sentence so that any injustice, if such there was, could have been addressed.’
Judges:
Gross J
Citations:
[2007] EWHC 640 (Admin)
Links:
Statutes:
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Crown Prosecution Service v Greenacre Admn 3-Apr-2007
Following his conviction for false accounting, a confiscation order was made against the defendant. After agreeing various adjournments the prosecutor said that the magistrates court had no power to allow such an adjournment under section 75(2) of . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Criminal Practice
Updated: 10 July 2022; Ref: scu.251150
