Charles Worthington

Charles is head of the Serious Fraud and Very High Cost Case (VHCC) team at Lansbury Worthington, and is responsible for civil litigation and employment law.

He studied at Goldsmiths' College, University of London, graduating in History, and spent the next 4 years in London as a motorcycle courier awaiting inspiration as to his future career. He subsequently attended the College of Law and qualified as a solicitor in 1992. He has specialised in both criminal defence from an early stage and has been a criminal courts duty solicitor since 1993. He joined Ben Lansbury in 1999 to form what was to become Lansbury Worthington Solicitors.

Charles is a member of the London Criminal Courts Solicitors Association. He is also a Privy Council Agent. He has represented clients facing the whole range of criminal offences, from murder to shoplifting, and including terrorism and international money laundering. He represented the lead defendant in the 2009 Univisas case, prosecuted as part of Operation Swale. Univisas was an immigration visa agency that assisted visa applicants to obtain false educational and employment documentation in support of bogus immigration applications, valued by the Crown at several million pounds, the proceeds of which were transferred from the UK to different accounts in India by a variety of means. This case was the lead prosecution brought by the Home Office against allegedly bogus immigration agencies and colleges (R v Shahi, Sharma & Sharma).

He subsequenty represented a Chinese national similarly accused of fraudulently conspiring with others to obtain UK student visas, to which they were not entitled (R v K & others), and who was acquitted of all charges at trial in December 2009.

Charles is currently defending in another Operation Swale prosecution of an immigration agency alleged to have been operating in an identical way to Univisas, and a Ukranian national accused of conspiring with others to create fake identities and then use these to defraud Revenue & Customs of millions of pounds in false income tax rebates.