Barnet diamond dealer laundered £30 million

The Barnet-based owner of Kosher Diamonds and his beautician partner have been jailed for 11 and ten years respectively for their role in laundering at least £30 million.

The Old Bailey heard how “greedy” Danny Koort, 52, and Jeanette Rosen, 49, used Koort’s diamond-trading business as a front to launder “dirty money,” with Rosen regularly transporting tens of thousands of pounds in cash around London.

Police found £300,000 stashed in Koort’s Fitzrovia offices when they finally swooped on the couple in 2014, after months of surveillance work. Investigators later deciphered codenames to reveal the huge amounts changing hands.

Sentencing Koort to 11 years, Judge Worsley told him it was greed and nothing else that led him into a life of organised crime, as he had been well-off beforehand.

“You were a successful dealer in diamonds and precious metals in Amsterdam, but that was a front for money laundering, a means of explaining large amounts of cash going through your premises,” he said on Monday.

“You were to all intents and purposes an honourable man with a legitimate and profitable business. But it was, I’m sad to say, greed that turned you in this direction.

“You were a perfectly respectable, hard-working and intelligent man with a good standard of living. There was no need at all, unlike some who appear in this court, to turn to crime, and yet you did.”

Rosen and fellow diamond dealer Andrew Russell were also sentenced for their role in shuttling up to a quarter of a million pounds in cash for the bilingual Koort, who ran his own business since 1978.

Prosecutors will now begin confiscating proceedings to recover some of the laundered money.