working. Thus, the CF8s were successfully introduced into the system and the risk of the applications being turned down avoided. Held, on appeal, dismissing the appeals, in by-passing the system, they were practising a deception on the department by causing the CF8s to enter the system as though they had been properly processed. It was clear that they intended that the department should treat the applications as regular in form and in compliance with procedure. They recognised that had the proper procedures been followed there was at least a chance that the applications would fail. This was a conspiracy to defraud. Officers of the department who played a part in processing the applications which, on their true facts, ought not to have been processed, were acting contrary to their public duty, and where the intended victim of a conspiracy to defraud was a person performing public duties, it was sufficient if the purpose was to cause him to contravene that duty, and the intended means of achieving it were dishonest. The purpose need not involve causing economic loss to anyone (see the dictum in Scott (1974) 60 Cr App R 124 at 131). The department was entitled to decide how the National Insurance contributions scheme should be administered, both locally and nationally, and it was not accepted that it was not defrauded by the circumvention of the system. R v Landy [1981] 1 WLR 355 (CA)

ABSTRACT

Lawton LJ: ... What the prosecution had to prove was a conspiracy to defraud which is an agreement dishonestly to do something which will or may cause loss or prejudice to another. The offence is one of dishonesty. This is the all-important ingredient which must be stressed by the judge in his directions to the jury and must not be minimised in any way. There is always a danger that a jury may think that proof of an irregularity followed by loss is proof of dishonesty. The dishonesty to be proved must be in the minds and intentions of the defendants. It is to their states of mind that the jury must direct their attention. What the reasonable man or the jurors themselves would have believed or intended in the circumstances in which the defendants found themselves is not what the jury have to decide; but what a reasonable man or they themselves would have believed or intended in similar circumstances may help them to decide what in fact individual defendants believed or intended. An assertion by a defendant that throughout a transaction he acted honestly does not have to be accepted but has to be weighed like any other piece of evidence. If that was the defendant’s state of mind, or may have been, he is entitled to be acquitted. But if the jury, applying their own notions of what is honest and what is not, conclude that he could not have believed that he was acting honestly, then the element of dishonesty will have been established. What a jury must not do is to say to themselves: ‘If we had been in his place we would have known we were acting dishonestly so he must have known he was’. What they can say is: ‘We are sure he was acting dishonestly because we can see no reason why a man of his intelligence and experience would not have appreciated, as right-minded people would have done, that what he was doing was dishonest’. In our judgment this is the way R v Feely [1973] QB 530 should be applied in cases where the issue of dishonesty arises. It is also the way in which the jury should have been directed in this case but, unfortunately, they were not ...