FOUR men will be sentenced at Southampton Crown Court next month for their roles in a plan to con £2m of taxpayers money from HM Revenue and Customs.

The quartet were alleged to have been involved in a conspiracy to open bank accounts by adopting, creating or hijacking individual identities.

Jurors were told Ruslanas Bobrovas, a qualified boxing coach from Lithuania, provided tax assistance to eastern Europeans who came to Britain seeking employment.

Foreign nationals could register with the HMRC for tax purposes and claim back money they had overpaid by submitting self-assessed tax returns at the end of the financial year.

The court was told individuals were asked to provide identification details to a gang who used them to fraudulently open bank accounts or instructed them to open bank accounts themselves which were controlled by the fraudsters.

Prosecutor Gareth Munday alleged more than 200 bank accounts were identified as being linked to the gang with in excess of 700 applications for fraudulent repayments totalling over £2m.

Two defendants – Besik Zveiba, 41, of Arundel Street, Southampton, and Kardo Anderson, 25, of Mansel Road East – were convicted at the end of a seven-week trial of conspiring to cheat the revenue.

Two other men – Lybomyur Sytailylo, 39, from Shepherds Bush, London, and Bobrovas, 38, of The Birches, Southampton – pleaded guilty before the trial got under way.

After the jury returned their verdicts, Anderson admitted two charges of possessing false identity documents and one of possessing bank cards for use in connection with fraud.

Two other defendants – Tatjana Novikova, 45, and her 24-year-old son, Arturas, both of The Birches, were acquitted of three charges of being concerned in arranging and facilitating the acquisition, use or control of criminal property and one of conspiring to cheat the revenue. Borbovas was also cleared of the criminal property charge.