David McNeill > Chambers of David Josse KC > London, England > Barrister Profile

David McNeill

+44 (0) 207 332 5400 clerks@5sah.co.uk View profile

Work Department

David is a barrister with a strong practice in fraud and serious and organised crime cases.

David is ranked in Chambers and Partners in financial crime.

Position

David is currently a door tenant at 5SAH. He is currently practising in Northern Ireland. He has built up a successful practice prosecuting and defending difficult, complex, multi-handed cases, both alone and being led. He is experienced in business crime, money-laundering, terrorist finance, drugs and organised crime cases. David is a specialist in confiscation, proceeds of crime and asset recovery. He is also instructed in commercial litigation and judicial reviews, particularly where there is an overlap between criminal and civil jurisdictions.

David has built up a wide experience prosecuting and defending difficult, complex, multi-handed cases, both alone and as junior counsel. He has particular knowledge of tax, VAT and Excise, drugs, money-laundering and organised crime cases and has been instructed on a number of cases with a significant international dimension.

Although the mainstay of David’s practice is in criminal litigation, he maintains a commercial civil practice in chambers’ main areas of practice. He is often instructed in areas such as fraud or asset forfeiture where there is an overlap between the criminal and civil worlds.

Direct Public Access

• David accepts Direct Public Access instructions.
• David is also called to the Bar of Northern Ireland.
• David maintains a long-standing interest in China. He has participated in seminars led by Chinese universities and prosecutors on improving defendants’ rights, lectured to Chinese students on English criminal law and established links with Chinese criminal defence lawyers. He has written chapters and articles about English law (both in English and Chinese) for publications in mainland China.

Career

• David was called to the Bar in 2003.

• Grade 4 advocate on Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) Unified Prosecution List.
• Grade 3 advocate on the CPS fraud List.
• Grade 3 advocate on the CPS Proceeds of Crime List.
• Grade 3 advocate on the CPS Serious and Organised Crime List.
• Grade 3 advocate on the CPS Counter-Terrorism list.

Asset Recovery, Civil Fraud & Confiscation

David maintains a strong practice in the parallel criminal and civil jurisdictions under POCA and its predecessors. He is regularly instructed by the police, HMRC and NCA in civil cash detention and forfeiture hearings and appeals, and is also experienced in advising and acting in restraint proceedings and applications for civil freezing injunctions. He has recently been instructed in a number of Asset Freezing and Forfeiture Order proceedings.

David has a wide experience of confiscation proceedings after conviction and is often instructed specifically for the confiscation or appeal stage of a case. Reported authorities include R v Morrison [2019] EWCA Crim 351, on tainted gifts, R v S [2019] EWCA Crim 569, on assistance to the police and section 22 applications, and CPS v Ahmed [2016] EWHC 1996 (Ch), on the clash between restraint orders and payment into court in civil litigation.

In recent years he has prosecuted numerous large scale confiscation proceedings, including a multi-handed £5m case arising out of the importation of half a ton of heroin, a £6.9m tax fraud and a £2m benefits fraud confiscation case. He has acted in £7m pound confiscation proceedings for a defendant convicted of laundering money for James Ibori, the corrupt Nigerian governor, and for a defendant convicted of defrauding international banks of more than £9m.

Business Crime & Financial Regulation

David has huge experience of acting both alone and as led junior in all types of fraud and financial services cases, including tax and duty evasion, investment frauds and FCA prosecutions. He is currently ranked in Chambers and Partners as a Band 4 leader in the field of financial crime.

In recent years David has successfully defended in Operation Alfreton, an FCA prosecution arising from the mis-selling of shares in a group of private healthcare companies based in Dubai. He was instructed by the Attorney General of Jersey in one of its biggest prosecutions in the last decade, Operation Parrot, resulting in the conviction of a well-known investment advisor for fraud and serious Financial Services Commission offences.

Other recent cases have included the UK’s first land banking fraud, a prosecution of four Gambian diplomats for a massive excise fraud run from the Gambian Embassy, a fraud on the Greater London Authority by a company which submitted fictitious claims for broadband installations, and the prosecution of a millionaire ex-solicitor who impersonated an HMRC officer in order to try to extract confidential information from the Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal in support of a £229m civil claim against the Law Society.

David is particularly comfortable in document-heavy, legally complex cases and where disclosure becomes a key issue. In 2010-2011, David and a colleague were jointly instructed by the CPS to review and report on HMRC’s disclosure systems in large scale Excise fraud. Since then he has been regularly instructed in a numerous cases in which the loss to the Revenue has been in the millions of pounds. He also carries out Tax Tribunal work and was instructed in 2013 as led junior for HMRC in a £6m MTIC appeal.

Criminal Prosecutions – Private & Public & Criminal Defence

David prosecutes and defends in a wide range of heavyweight cases, specialising in organised and complex crime. As well as his substantial practice in fraud and business crime, he prosecutes and defends the full range of serious criminal offences trials, from murder and rape to large scale criminal conspiracies involving drug trafficking, money laundering and people smuggling.

He has recently both prosecuted and defended in unusual murder cases where the defendant both denied carrying out the killing and pursued a defence of diminished responsibility because of paranoid schizophrenia.

In Operation Miching, David prosecuted a series of trials of fraudsters who targeted elderly victims by telephone, defrauding them of their life savings and using the proceeds to fund Islamic State in Syria.

Recently David has acted in several cases involving use of the dark web and cryptocurrency, both to facilitate trafficking in prohibited firearms and drugs and also to launder the proceeds of crime.

David advises on and acts in cases involving sensitive intelligence, PII issues and very complex disclosure tasks. He particularly enjoys cases that raise interesting and novel points of law. On the prosecution side, he is experienced in leading case teams of lawyers and officers and advising from an early stage.

David accepts private and direct access instructions in criminal cases where appropriate, and has a particular expertise in road traffic law. He is also often instructed in private prosecutions, especially when they give rise to complex disclosure issues.

David is a Grade 4 CPS prosecutor, on the Organised Crime, Fraud, Counter Terrorism and Proceeds of Crime panels. He previously prosecuted Customs, Revenue and DWP cases as counsel on the Attorney-General’s List and on the Serious Fraud Office’s Panel of Counsel.

Chancery & Commercial

David has maintained a civil practice has always been in litigation involving small and medium sized businesses as well as individuals. He advises and acts in commercial contractual disputes, especially involving professional services and negligence claims including cases involving engineers, builders, architects, financial advisors and consultants, solicitors and accountants. He undertakes both first instance trials and also appeals from the County Court, High Court applications for security for costs and freezing orders, abuse of process applications and Companies Court applications before registrars and judges.

David is also experienced in consumer law, acting both for the consumer and provider in cases turning on misrepresentation, breaches of implied terms, penalty charges and unfair terms legislation.

Judicial Review & Public Law

David undertakes judicial review and public law cases, both for government agencies and for claimants.

He is especially experienced in the area of search warrants and other investigatory powers. He represented the National Crime Agency in a number of related cases under Operation Heterodon. The main case was Chatwani v NCA [2015] EWHC 1283 (Admin), now the leading authority on when the Administrative Court can quash a warrant and order the return or destruction of everything seized under the warrant.

He has also acted on other important NCA cases, including international bribery and drug trafficking operations and Operation Bevel, a challenge based on delay examining electronic devices. David’s experience in disclosure operations and from acting as independent counsel in large investigations gives him a practical insight into how investigating authorities work.

David has also acted for HMRC in several large cases, including a challenge to a tax fraud investigation brought by Newcastle United FC.

His cases for claimants include a challenge to a search warrant which was defective because the police failed to mention to the court the existence of related civil litigation which generated items subject to legal professional privilege.

Memberships

• Criminal Bar Association.
• Fraud Lawyers Association.