An appeal against conviction for a massive football fraud was red-carded by the Court of Appeal on Wednesday – but former CIFA executive Canover Watson had his eight-year sentence cut by 12 months.
The Court of Appeal panel of three judges, led by president Sir John Golding, ruled that the conviction of Watson, on fraud and money laundering of US$1.54 million while an official at the Cayman Islands Football Association, was correct.
An appeal against sentence by former CIFA colleague Bruce Blake, cleared of money laundering, but convicted of two charges of false accounting, was allowed, but dismissed by the panel.
The written judgment said: “The case against Canover Watson was a strong one. He has sought to advance many disparate grounds of appeal against conviction, none of which in our judgment renders the convictions unsafe or satisfactory.
“We refuse his application for leave to appeal against conviction.”
The appeal court added: “In the result, having sought to stand back and consider the case against Bruce Blake as a whole … we have concluded the convictions on counts seven and eight are safe.
“In his case, however, we grant leave to appeal but dismiss the appeal.”
The two men were jailed in April last year, with Watson, the architect of the fraud, which was carried out in 2013-14, given the heaviest sentence. Blake was jailed for two years.
Watson was sentenced to three-and-a-half-years for obtaining secret commissions, two years for money laundering and four-and-a-half-years for false accounting.
The secret commissions involved payments of US$1.54 million obtained by Watson from regional football body CONCACAF through the presentation of false invoices for sports equipment said to be from a kit supplier in Pakistan.
But the cash was sent to a Panama-based company with a similar name, controlled by Watson, and most of the football kits, bags and other equipment invoiced were never delivered.
Chief Justice Margaret Ramsay-Hale had ordered the money-laundering and false-accounting sentences to run concurrently, and the secret commissions sentence to run consecutively, for a total of eight years.
Cayman’s reputation of ‘fundamental importance’
The appeals court judgment said, “The reputation of the Cayman Islands as a financial centre is of fundamental importance to the well-being of every person who lives in the Cayman Islands.
“Sentencing those whose offending deleteriously affects that reputation must reflect that.”
However, the judges said they had not found it “entirely easy to follow how the sentence of eight years’ imprisonment was intended to be made up.”
They added there could be “no justifiable criticism” of the three-and-a-half-year jail term, or the concurrent two-year sentence … being consecutive to the three-and-a-half years.”
But the judgment said, “We have, however, concluded that the sentence of four-and-a-half-years imprisonment consecutive to the three-and-a-half-years imprisonment … is excessive…”
In considering all the counts and various concurrent and consecutive sentences, and the “criminality involved”, the court decided the result should be “an overall sentence of seven years’ imprisonment.
“We therefore grant Canover Watson leave to appeal against sentence and allow his appeal to the limited extent that his sentence is reduced from eight years’ imprisonment to seven years’ imprisonment.”
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