Company director jailed over £7m airline parts fraud

The director of a British company which sold £7m-worth of aircraft engine parts using falsified documents has been sentenced to four years and eight months in prison for fraud.

Jose Alejandro Zamora Yrala ran an aircraft parts company that supplied tens of thousands of components around the world, for widely used aircraft engines, with forged paperwork.

Delivering the sentence, Judge Simon Picken said Zamora Yrala's actions constituted a "more or less complete undermining" of the rules and regulations designed to ensure passenger flights are safe.

Zamora Yrala, 38, pleaded guilty to fraudulent trading in December following an investigation carried out by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO).

Southwark Crown Court heard that between 2019 and 2023, Zamora Yrala's company AOG Technics supplied an estimated 60,000 parts for CFM56 engines with forged documents.

The CFM56, built by CFM International, is the world's bestselling aircraft engine.

It is used on several versions of the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320, as well as some larger aircraft.

Working from his home office in Surrey, Zamora Yrala sold parts directly to airlines and maintenance and repair companies, as well as to other aircraft parts brokers.

The scam came to light when an engineer at the Portuguese airline TAP queried the origins of a part he was struggling to fit; the manufacturer subsequently confirmed that its documentation was fake.

Discovery of the fraud in 2023 led to the grounding of planes in the UK and around the world so that engines could be checked and parts replaced where necessary.

Among the carriers affected were Ryanair, American Airlines, Ethiopian Airlines and TAP Air Portugal. Overall losses were estimated at £39.3m, according to the SFO.

The production and sale of aircraft parts is heavily regulated. So called Authorised Release Certificates (ARCs) are used as proof that critical new or refurbished parts are airworthy.

But the ARCs used by Zamora Yrala were falsified, the court heard.

Some of them were genuine certificates supplied by an accomplice working as a technician at an airline, but with details altered on his home computer. Others were forgeries created with the help of a Spanish graphic designer.

Prosecutors said Zamora Yrala also produced fake documents which purported to show where AOG Technics had obtained the parts from.

He also invented fake employees, with customers receiving emails and documents signed by a range of fabricated sales managers and quality managers, as part of creating an illusion of a legitimate business, the SFO said.

In fact only Zamora Yrala himself, his then wife, her brother and the family's nanny were ever on the payroll, the court heard.

The fraud led to some 60,000 suspect engine parts entering the global aviation supply chain, sold by AOG for nearly £7 million.

The origin of those parts remains unknown.

"It is almost impossible to identify where parts sold with forged certificates came from", explained Harriet Sassoon, case controller at the SFO.

Alongside his jail sentence, Zamora Yrala was disqualified from acting as a company director for eight years. He will face proceeds of crime proceedings later this year.

A related investigation, carried out by the Portuguese authorities, is still going on.