TWO men who conned the States of Guernsey out of millions of pounds and laundered it in Abu Dhabi and Istanbul have been jailed for their roles in the operation.

The ‘Lagan fraud’ saw Guernsey’s Treasury and Resources Department lose £2.6 million, which was transferred through bank accounts across the world.

Adrian Taylor (44), who was jailed for six years, admitted one charge of entering into a money-laundering arrangement and acquiring criminal property, and attempting to fool a bank into believing that he was a millionaire at Southwark Crown Court this week.

Co-accused John Woodhatch (58) was jailed for five years after he also admitted entering into a money laundering arrangement and transferring criminal property, both charges relating to the Guernsey scam.

At the time, Guernsey was in the process of building a new airport runway in a £56 million contract granted to the company Lagan Construction.

Prosecutor James Dawes told the court how the two men had seized on the multi-million-pound runway project as a target for their fraud.

The two fraudsters discovered that Treasury and Resources paid large sums of money to the company each month for its work, and that is when they became involved in the plot to defraud the Bailiwick of Guernsey out of £2.6 million.

Mr Dawes said: ‘In the middle of June 2012, a person pretending to be from Lagan Construction rang the Treasury Department to ask if they could change the bank details which the government held for them. The person who was in charge of security allowed the change to go through, and on 3 July 2012, £2,613,032 was deposited into the account in the name of Sports Currency Management Ltd.

After the transfer, Woodhatch was busy distributing the money as fast as he could out of his bank and into other accounts, some of which were in Istanbul and Abu Dhabi, and the money was never recovered.

The fraud was uncovered after Woodhatch failed to convince the Royal Bank of Scotland that cash funnelled through his accounts was for a racehorse in Dubai.

Taylor handed himself into the City of London Police after it was revealed that Woodhatch had transferred him £52,000.