The leader of a personal protective equipment (PPE) scam who bought Rolex watches and luxury cars after scamming companies out of millions of pounds during the Covid-19 pandemic has been jailed.

Jogesh Bhandari, 60, spent £126,000 on a Porsche and bought an Audi A5, a Land Rover Discovery and jewellery after pretending he could supply millions of boxes of nitrile gloves in the US and Germany between late 2020 and early 2022.

Jogesh and Craig Morris, who helped with the sham deals, were convicted of conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation and concealing and transferring criminal property, at Leicester Crown Court in July.

On Friday, Jogesh was sentenced to eight years in prison.

At a previous hearing on 7 October, Morris, of Forest Drive in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison.

Jogesh's wife, former pharmacist Meenakashi Bhandari, 58, of Mitchell Drive, Loughborough, was found guilty of concealing and transferring criminal property.

On 7 October, she was given a two-year prison sentence, suspended for two years, 250 hours of unpaid work and 15 days of rehabilitation activity.

Sentencing Jogesh at Northampton Crown Court, Judge William Harbage KC said the defendant was the "driving force" of the offending as the "directing mind" of Banton - the company used by him and Morris to make fraudulent deals.

The judge said remorse expressed by Jogesh in a letter to the court was "difficult to accept given how vigorously you contested these charges".

Jogesh defrauded US company Med18 and German firm MedTech by sending contracts for equipment he did not have, the court heard.

The fraud began in November 2020 when Jogesh agreed a deal to provide 12 million boxes of gloves, and a company paid into a fraudulent escrow account provided by Frank Labruzzo, an attorney in the Louisiana Attorney General's Office.

Rather than money remaining in the account until the deal was complete, it was immediately paid to Labruzzo and Jogesh.

Millions of pounds were paid into the account, including a payment of more than $3.18m in early 2021 for an order of nitrile gloves to be sent to US hospitals that were never delivered.

The court heard Jogesh kept £1.75m in the course of the fraud.

In his letter, which was partly read aloud, Jogesh wrote that he has "destroyed the life of the woman I truly love with all my heart", adding "now she despises me".

The court heard Jogesh also pretended to have cancer, which Bardill said was a "spur of the moment lie" because the defendant was "completely out of his depth".

Bardill told the court: "There is an element of using the dishonesty to run away from the stress, pressure and consequences of those actions."

He added: "This man standing before you, up until this point, has been a man of good character, a family man, a man who brought up two children.

"It was a mixture of greed, a mixture of, as I say, terrible decisionmaking.

"When I say he's lost everything, I'm deadly serious. He really has lost everything because of that offence."

Bardill said Jogesh was "extremely anxious" about how his health issues, which include a pacemaker he recently had fitted, would be dealt with in prison.

Among 47,000 WhatsApp messages between Jogesh and Morris, the National Crime Agency (NCA) previously said, Morris wrote: "All over the news is all about ppe shortage. Let's clean up!! Milk it... fill ya boots."

The NCA said Jogesh replied: "(Thumbs up) it's about a good teamwork and EVERYONE making money."

In another message, Jogesh sent an image of a Rolls-Royce to Morris and said: "But if I want one of these then we need to keep going."

All three defendants were arrested in February 2023, the NCA said.

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