THE lynchpin of a £38m car scam operation has been jailed for more than six years.

Richard Shepherd ran a shop called Image Grafix, based in London Road, Swanley, which he used as a front to illegally change the identity of around 1,800 vehicles.

The majority of these were Mercedes, BMWs and Range Rovers as well as expensive diggers used by the building industry.

Shepherd was sentenced at Southwark Crown Court on March 12 after pleading guilty to committing trademark offences and laundering £38m worth of stolen cars.

He had pleaded not guilty but later changed his plea.

The 43-year-old was licensed by the DVLA to manufacture car number plates.

However, he also set up a website which provided a variety of false identification items such as chassis and Vehicle Identification Number components.

The website was investigated by Kent Trading Standards in 1999 and 2003.

Following a Met Police investigation Shepherd was also given a nine-month jail term in 2003 for ringing his own car with stolen plates.

The Met’s stolen vehicle unit began an investigation in 2006 and Shepherd was arrested in the shop on May 5 that year.

Nephew's fingerprints

At the time Shepherd was awaiting delivery of a new £136,000 Ferrari.

Hidden in the shop safe, for which Shepherd claimed he had lost the keys, police found records of his income.

These enabled officers to calculate that during a five-year period he had failed to declare £385,000, equating to the ringing of 1,800 vehicles. These were worth an average of £20,000 each.

Officers recovered false chassis plates, computers, an industrial stamping machine and records.

Shepherd’s nephew Jamie Langdon was also arrested at the shop.

Officers found Langdon’s fingerprints on the number plates of stolen vehicles.

Shepherd, from Birchington in Kent, was sentenced to four years on two counts of misuse of manufacturers’ trademarks.

He was also sentenced to six-and-a-half years on two counts of money laundering. The sentences will run concurrently.

Langdon, of Brockwell Close in Orpington, was given 250 hours’ community service as part of a two-year supervision order for two counts of misuse of manufacturing trademarks.

The 21-year-old had also changed his pleas to guilty after the trial started.