Abdul Muttakin Robbani, 54, walked into Chelmsford Crown Court with a four-year-and-eight-month sentence hanging over his head. The court found him guilty of defrauding the UK government of £708,750 by submitting 60 false Gift Aid claims through his organisation, RMI Club. He did this by naming 716 individuals as donors who had supposedly contributed between £5,000 and £10,000 each—donations that never happened.
The scheme relied on a lie so specific it almost sounds like a movie script. Robbani told HMRC these donors were recruited via a 'Sigma Social Impact Programme' linked to a cryptocurrency mining scheme called 'XO' that he created. In reality, many of these 716 people had merely filled out online surveys for small payments. They didn't know RMI Club. They didn't know Robbani. They certainly didn't donate thousands of pounds.
HMRC’s Fraud Investigation Service cracked the case in June 2021 when their compliance team spotted the anomalies. They dug into the bank records and found the smoking gun: several accounts used to simulate these large donations had balances of just £1 before the fraud began. A cryptocurrency expert commissioned during the probe confirmed Robbani’s XO token had no objective value. The 'donations' were just money moving in circles between accounts he controlled, using the victims' names as payment references.
So where did the money go? It vanished into personal debts. Robbani used the stolen public funds to pay off mortgages on two properties in Chelmsford and Ipswich. He then transferred both properties into his wife's name. Steve Doyle, Assistant Director at HMRC's Fraud Investigation Service, noted that Robbani stole money meant for genuine charities to settle his own financial obligations.
The judge didn't stop at prison time. Robbani is disqualified from acting as a company director for 15 years and faces a five-year Serious Crime Prevention Order post-release. This isn't his first run with the law; he has prior convictions for deception and forgery from the 1990s, and the Charity Commission removed a charity he chaired in 2011. Confiscation proceedings under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 are currently ongoing to recover the remaining £485,750 still in his possession.