GcMAF financial controller "believed the product was a supplement"

Thursday 07 February 2019

Over the last 24 hours, questions have been fired at Immuno Biotech's financial controller during his evidence before the Royal Court.

Peter Dawson-Ball, 64, is charged with three counts of money laundering, as it is suspected he knowingly benefited from the proceeds of crime: that crime being the unlawful distribution of an unlicensed medicine, namely, GcMAF.

He denies the charge, arguing that he was unaware the product Immuno Biotech were producing was a medicine. Rather, he has told Judge Russell Finch and the Jurats, that he always believed it was a supplement, and as a man "who is not a scientist", he had no reason to question this. 

Mr Dawson-Ball first took to the stand on Tuesday afternoon, and was being questioned all through yesterday. His defence advocate, Mark Dunster, ran the defendant chronologically through his years working for David Noakes at Immuno Biotech, and made the argument that the "penny finally dropped" only after his arrest in 2017. 

David Noakes, the man behind Immuno-Biotech, is alleged to have conned the defendant into believing GcMAF was a supplement and not a medicine. He was sentenced to jail in front of Southwark Crown Court last year (pictured). 

But the prosecution says Mr Dawson-Ball was fully aware of the fact he was "in a deeply criminal alliance". Their evidence includes email chains from clients who were looking for ways to evade US customs, and then asked him to delete any evidence of their correspondence, and telephone conversation transcripts where Mr Dawson-Ball is said to have been talking about whether "cleaners were coming in to sweep the house" and if a "car was clean of everything". Many of these conversations happened around the time David Noakes, the mastermind behind Immuno Biotech, was first arrested.

Mr Dawson-Ball has argued that arrest didn't tip him off to anything suspicious because Noakes was often being questioned by the authorities. He said it was not the first time something like this had happened, and the staff were just trying to work out "what was going on". 

But Crown Advocate Will Giles said this did not stack up. He asked why would a man like Mr Dawson-Ball believe Noakes, that the product was a supplement and didn't need licensing?

Mr Dawson-Ball said scientists working for Immuno-Biotech and doctors had told him GcMAF was a supplement. 

He asked whether, when the defendant was applying for the job at Immuno-Biotech, he had not googled the name and seen the numerous claims that it cures cancer, something a supplement surely could not do? As financial controller, the defendant said he had seen these claims, but did not think that was out of the remit of a supplement. 

Advocate Giles showed the court examples of when Noakes had told Mr Dawson-Ball to exclude his name, or the company name, from bank accounts and invoices, which he said in his view was "general white collar crime behaviour" - trying to hide behind corporate structures. This linked to how Mr Dawson-Ball was running companies in the Netherlands to do business for Immuno Biotech. This was a practice they started after their bank accounts were frozen in Guernsey. 

The prosecution's core point was that you did not need to be a scientist to question why a vitamin D supplement, which could be cheaply bought from a supermarket, was costing Immuno BIotech's customers £450 to £600 a week. 

Samata MacPane, another senior employee of Immuno Biotech, is also facing similar charges to Mr Dawson-Ball, but has pleaded guilty.

Noakes was sentenced to 18 months behind bars when he appeared in Southwark Crown Court toward the end of last year. He was charged with knowingly producing and distributing an unlicensed medicine. 

Mr Dawson-Ball's trial continues today.