Man jailed after selling £7m of fake plane parts
By Joshua Askew
A man has been jailed after selling almost £7m worth of counterfeit plane parts that grounded hundreds of international flights.
Jose Alejandro Zamora Yrala, from Virginia Water in Surrey, previously admitted defrauding customers between 2019 and 2023 while director of UK company AOG Technics.
The former techno DJ sold more than 60,000 fake parts that were fitted into passenger aircraft used by airlines across the world, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has said.
He was jailed for four years and eight months at Southwark Crown Court.
Emma Luxton, director of operations at the SFO, said the 38-year-old “risked public safety in a way that defies belief”.
‘Defrauded customers’
Planes were grounded in 2023 after UK, US and EU aviation agencies issued safety alerts to airlines that may have purchased or installed AOG’s parts.
Working from his garage, Zamora Yrala had bought engine blades, bolts and washers before forging documents on his computer to sell them on.
The parts were used in the world’s most widely used passenger aircraft engine, the CFM56, which powers the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320.
Prosecutor Faras Baloch told the court Zamora Yrala had “defrauded customers” by falsifying paperwork about the parts’ origin, condition and status.
Zamora Yrala invented fake employees, with customers receiving emails and documents signed by fabricated sales and quality managers, according to the SFO.
The value of the sold parts was around £6.9m, it added.
The offending was discovered in 2023 after a bolt Zamora Yrala had supplied to a Portuguese airline would not fit on an engine.
This led to an examination of the documentation, and the eventual grounding of planes after safety notices were issued on 4 August, 2023.
Airlines lost a total of £39.3m, the court heard earlier, with Ryanair, American Airlines, Ethiopian Airlines and TAP Air Portugal among those affected.
American Airlines did not buy directly from AOG, but still found that 28 of its engines were affected and it lost £21m from the fallout.
Sentencing, Mr Justice Simon Picken said Zamora Yrala used several elements of “subterfuge”.
He said: “Your offending was more or less a complete undermining of the regulatory framework designed to safeguard the millions of people who fly every day, every year.”
Zamora Yrala was also disqualified from acting as a company director for eight years and will face proceeds of crime proceedings later this year.
SFO prosecutor Harriet Sassoon told BBC Radio Surrey that the sentence “merits how significant this criminality is”.
“It’s very difficult to tell what the profit was because we don’t know the source of the parts and where he was acquiring them from,” she added.
