Shaobo Qin, a director of EDU Case Ltd, pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation.
At Birmingham crown court on 16 May 2025, he was given a two-year prison sentence suspended for 18 months.
Qin, of Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, was also ordered to pay a Proceeds of Crime confiscation order of £255,057, which he now must pay within two months or face three years in prison.
He was also disqualified as a director for four years and ordered to do 200 hours of unpaid work.
EDU Case was fined £200,000. The Environment Agency were also awarded £21,995 in investigation costs.
The court was told Qin’s company was a plastics and recycling exports enterprise. The offences were discovered by the Environment Agency towards the end of 2022.
Audit
The company was found to be deliberately and systematically entering false data on to the Environment Agency’s National Packaging Waste Database (NPWD) for non-existent waste exports.
This resulted in Qin receiving a benefit for himself and his company in the sum of approximately £255,000. He was arrested on 10 January 2024 where he was interviewed by Environment Agency officers.
EDU Case were accredited to carry out plastic packaging exports and able to issue “evidence” of that activity in the form of tonnage figures on the database. This evidence could be bought by businesses who are obliged to account for their plastic packaging waste under the Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations 2007.
An audit conducted by Environment Agency officers in 2023, and information following that work, identified discrepancies between the amount of waste exported and the amount of evidence issued. The false entries represented nearly two-thirds of the business’ entire trade in 2022 towards the end of that year.
As part of that audit, a legal notice was served on Qin and the company in September 2023. In response, Qin sent a computer memory stick containing his business’ waste export evidence and a letter explaining a large discrepancy, described as an “overclaim”.
The letter stated that the company had carried out 1,239 metric tonnes of plastic waste exports in 2022, but only 453.60 metric was genuine and that the majority of his trading, 785.40 metric tonnes was “a mistake”.
‘Deliberate offending’
In sentencing the judge said this was without doubt deliberate offending and pre-planned. There had been a significant undermining of the regulatory regime.
He accepted that there had been a guilty plea entered at first opportunity and that money had been put aside to repay the financial benefit made. The company was also fined to mark the seriousness of the offending.
Sham Singh, senior environmental crime officer for the Environment Agency, said: “This was a fraud on a large scale and undermines legitimate business and the investment and economic growth that go with it.
“We support legitimate businesses and are proactively supporting them by disrupting and stopping the criminal element backed up by the threat of tough enforcement as in this case.”
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