The Czech police has been investigating the case in cooperation with their colleagues from Great Britain, where the main perpetrators who controlled the gang are being prosecuted, Jaroslav Ibehej, spokesman of the National Centre for Combating Organised Crime told the agency.

Three Czech citizens and one foreign national have been charged in connection with the case.

According to Czech Radio, they are representatives of two Prague-based firms Balli Steel Czech and Swiss Forfait, which are linked to the British-Iranian holding Balli Group.

Mr Ibehej told the Czech News Agency that the perpetrators pretended to carry out international steel trades which were paid via bills of exchange.

They submitted documents on these fictitious transactions to financial institutions in the Czech Republic, from which they received hundreds of millions of crowns on the basis of these documents. Altogether they carried out more than twenty such transactions.

The detectives from the National Centre for Combatting Organized Crime have been investigating the case since 2013 and the prosecution was launched in 2017.

“The crime was to create fictitious customer-supplier relationships that copied real-life trades of foreign companies,” Mr. Ibehej told the Czech News Agency.