TWO Elland men jailed over a £6m booze fraud, after an 11-month trial costing the taxpayer millions more, have had their convictions overturned at the Appeal Court.

But a third man must go to a retrial.

William Potter, 63, of High Meadows, Greetland, and John Heppenstall, 70, of Victoria Road, Elland, were sentenced to two years and three years in jail respectively. They were said by prosecutors to have acted as hauliers in the conspiracy.

They had denied any involvement in the “diversion” fraud and their convictions were quashed yesterday. They will not be retried.

The other man, who was said to have acted as a “broker” in the fraud but insisted he was “merely an innocent dupe”, also had his conviction and four-year sentence overturned, but now faces a retrial.

He cannot be named for legal reasons.

The length of the men’s trial, along with flaws in the judge’s directions to the jury, meant the trio’s convictions were “unsafe” and had to be overturned, the court ruled.

Observing that the case “presents a dispiriting picture”, Lord Justice Moses said the issues were not complicated and the Kingston Crown Court trial was supposed to last only four months.

But, in the end, it stretched to more than 235 days, with barristers ploughing through reams of documents and frequent adjournments to allow jurors to take holidays they had booked.

The “frequently disrupted” hearing “took far too long”, and when the judge finally came to sum up the case to the jury, his words did “scant justice” to the three men’s defence.

Overturning all three convictions, Lord Justice Moses, sitting with Mr Justice Jack and Mr Justice Owen, said: “It is not possible to have any confidence that safe verdicts were reached at the conclusion of a fair process.

“There were issues which the jury had to determine and we have reluctantly come to the conclusion that they were deprived of the fair opportunity to reach rational conclusions; the aim of an expeditious and focused trial.

“We are compelled to the conclusion that the trial process was so defective, and the failure of the summing up to cure those defects so great, that the verdicts are unsafe.”

At trial, it was the prosecution’s case that the trio were involved in a lengthy and lucrative fraud that involved 74 loads of alcohol, said to be destined for abroad, being diverted back into the UK via a bonded warehouse to avoid excise duty.

They were all convicted of conspiracy to contravene section 170 of the Customs and Excise Act in November last year.