Tax fraudster Ian Leaf has been ordered to pay back £16.25m by the courts.
The fomer chartered accountant is currently serving a ten-year prison sentence, after being convicted two years ago of 13 counts of fraudulent trading.
His frauds generated £55m during a nine-year period in the 1990's.
HM Revenue & Customs had been seeking to recover £33m, but at Southwark Crown Court Leaf said almost all the gains from the illegal scams had gone into a complex network of family trusts whose value had shrunk significantly in the past five years.
BDO Stoy Hayward was called in to confirm the shrinkage of the assets.
The confiscation order, which was handed down but for technical reasons not finalised formally, is one of the largest confiscation rulings on record. To put the scale of the penalty into context, the taxman recovered £23m from convicted criminals in total during 2006/2007.
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