Jersey Unreported Judgments

[2011]JRC093

ROYAL COURT

(Samedi Division)

6^th May 2011

The Attorney General

-v-

Justin Peter Michel

Sentencing by the Superior Number of the Royal Court, after conviction at Assize trial on 29^th March, 2011, on a charge of:

1 count of:      Attempting to pervert the course of public justice (Count 1). 

Age:  43.

Plea: Not guilty.

Details of Offence:

The defendant's father, Peter Wilson Michel, was a money launderer, laundering cash for overseas tax fraudsters.  In July 2001, the police conducted searches at Peter Michel's home and business premises.  From the outset, Peter Michel was the target of the investigation and his prosecution for money laundering, together with the formal freezing and confiscation of his assets, was always contemplated by the prosecuting authority.  Foreseeing that his wealth was thus at risk, Peter Michel sought to shield his personal assets from the investigation and from the risk of confiscation by transferring it into the names of family members, chief amongst them was the defendant, an Advocate of the Royal Court. 

In the course of some 20 months following the raids, Peter Michel transferred property worth some £2.3 million into the names of his wife, his daughter, his mistress and the defendant.  The defendant received from his father in this way property worth some £1.1 million.  The transfers included cash at the bank, real estate, company shares, valuable art work and high performance motor cars. 

The defendant and his father shared the common purpose of moving these assets out of Peter Michel's name with the intention of shielding them from the police investigation, from being frozen by the Court Order and from being counted as Peter Michel's realisable assets for the purposes of any Confiscation Order.  Had their plan succeeded, the amount of any Confiscation Order against Peter Michel would have been unjustly and falsely reduced as a consequence. 

In fact, all the transferred property was identified by investigators and was eventually subject to a saisie judiciaire obtained by the Attorney General in November 2004 on the basis that either (a) the transfers were shams intended to disguise Peter Michel's continuing ownership of them or (b) they were gifts which were caught by the Proceeds of Crime (Jersey) Law 1999 and thus remained, on either basis, the realisable assets of Peter Michel which were thus liable to confiscation. 

In response to the saisie judiciaire, the defendant redoubled his attempt to shield the assets transferred to him from the confiscation by falsely asserting to a senior Crown Advocate within the Law Officer's Department that they represented contractual payments by his father to him for legal work he had performed on his father's case.  Had that explanation been accepted as the truth by either the Prosecution or the Court, those assets would have fallen outside the definition of realisable property in the 1999 Law and would not have been included as Peter Michel's realisable assets.  The amount of any Confiscation Order against Peter Michel would have been wrongly reduced as a consequence. 

The defendant's lie that the transfers to him were contractual payments for legal services was repeated by his father, Peter Michel, at the confiscation hearing which took place after Peter Michel's convictions for money laundering in 2006 and 2007.  At that hearing, Peter Michel falsely claimed that certain assets transferred to the defendant were no longer his realisable assets for confiscation purposes because they were payment for legal services provided to him by his son. 

Details of Mitigation:

Previous good character and the age of the case.

Previous Convictions:

None.

Conclusions:

Count 1:         2 years' imprisonment. 

Sentence and Observations of Court:

The jury at trial had disbelieved the defendant's evidence.  Whilst the defendant had not committed the offence in his rôle as an Advocate of the Royal Court, nonetheless trust between advocates and the judiciary lay at the heart of the integrity of the justice system which the defendant, an Officer of the Royal Court, was sworn to uphold.  The fact that the defendant was an Advocate at the time of the offending was a serious aggravating factor. 

Neither community service nor a suspended sentence was adequate to meet the gravity of the offence.  Nonetheless, the Court felt bound by the case of AG-v-Weston (where a reduced sentence of 12 months' imprisonment was substituted on appeal on a defendant who sought to conceal incriminating evidence) to reflect the fact that perverting the course of justice with the object of escaping the consequences of one's own or, as here, another's acts, was not as serious as cases of perverting the course of justice for the purposes of securing the conviction of innocent people. 

Count 1:         15 months' imprisonment. 

Confiscation proceedings postponed.

M. T. Jowitt, Esq., Crown Advocate.

Advocate M. L. Preston for the Defendant.

JUDGMENT

THE commissioner:

1.        The Court has received a number of impressive references from colleagues at the Bar and from others replete with the words honesty, integrity and sincerity.  It is very sad that this defendant, whose career as an advocate of the Royal Court has until now been unblemished, should have gone so wrong that his career has come to this abrupt and tawdry end. 

2.        At the very core of the relationship between an advocate and this Court is the virtue of truthfulness and her first cousin trust.  If an advocate cannot be truthful with the Court there cannot be trust, and without trust between Counsel and the Bench, the process of justice is undermined. 

3.        We accept that this defendant was not acting as an advocate when these actions were performed but he was nonetheless acting as legal adviser to his father.  One cannot escape the fact that an attempt to pervert the course of justice by an advocate is a very serious matter.  We have listened very carefully to the persuasive submissions of Mr Preston but we do not think that in the circumstances of this case a sentence of community service, or indeed a suspension of custody, would be an appropriate penalty.  We must accept, however, the ruling of the Court of Appeal in AG-v-Weston [1980] JJ 43 that a distinction is to be drawn between an offence which seeks to inculpate someone else and an offence involving an attempt to escape the consequences of one's own acts or, in this case, the consequences of the father's acts. 

4.        In mitigation we accept that the defendant is of previous good character and we accept of course all the other submissions that we have heard relating to the catastrophic consequences of this conviction. 

5.        The jury did not believe you when you told them on oath that you did not know if these transfers represented gifts or payments for professional services.  As you knew, in your heart of hearts, neither of these innocent explanations was in fact the truth.  The jury found that your purpose in accepting these transfers was an attempt, a clumsy attempt maybe, to shield your father's wealth from seizure and confiscation, and that was an attempt to pervert the course of justice. 

6.        The sentence of the Court is that you will go to prison for 15 months.

Authorities

AG-v-Weston [1980] JJ 43.

R-v-Michael Hesse [2004] 2 Cr. App. R. (S) 41.

R-v-Bruce Hyman 19^th September 2007 (Unreported).

R-v-Rowell [1977] 65 Cr. App. R. 174 (S) 56.

R-v-Snelling [1996] 2 Cr. App. R. (5) 56.

R-v-Brown [2004] EWCA Crim 744.

AG-v-Kittleson [2011] JCA 052.