Cocaine kingpin who made £2.5m a month and plotted murd£r of rival is jailed for 32 years

A British drug lord who plotted the murd£r of a gang rival from his luxury base in Dubai has been jailed for at least 32 years.

James Harding, 34, and his partner Jayes Kharouti, 39, ran a vast £100million criminal empire that generated up to £2.5million a month in profits. 

They tried to recruit a hitman to put an unnamed rival courier ‘permanently out of business’, arming him with a gun and ammunition for the ‘full M’ – a murder – the court was told.

At the time, Harding, who claimed to be a high-end watch sales executive, was living in luxury in Dubai, staying in five-star hotels and driving Bugatti and Lamborghini sports cars.

The plot was exposed by Scotland Yard officers who accessed more than 9,000 of their messages on EncroChat after French police smashed the encrypted network favoured by criminals.

Harding was handed a life sentence with a minimum term of 32 years, reduced to 28 years’ and 183 days given the time he has already spent in custody. Kharouti was also sentenced to life with a minimum term of 26 years.

Judge Anthony Leonard said the scale of the operation was ‘unimaginable’.

He noted messages in which the defendants discussed violence against anyone tempted to speak to the police about their drug business.

In one message, Harding said: ‘You just have to know where their nan lives. They all love their nans. They know granny is going to get it in the head lol.’

Harding had only been out of prison for four years when he opted to ‘trade up’ from supplying Class B to Class A drugs which reaped greater rewards.

Kharouti also had previous convictions for the supply of cocaine and cannabis, the court heard.

Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson KC told the trial the defendants spoke about importing a tonne of cocaine over a period of 10 weeks.

Harding used the nickname ‘thetopsking’ while Kharouti went by the handles ‘besttops’ and ‘topsybricks’, prosecutors said.

In EncroChat messages, the pair discussed the robbery of a drugs courier and Kharouti reported back on whether six or seven kilograms of cocaine had been delivered to a client the day before.

‘Mr Atkinson said it was Harding who first raised the idea of a ‘cryp robbery’ – taking drugs from a courier – which instead became a plan to k!ll a driver.

The defendants discussed how and where the murder would take place, with Kharouti offering the potential hitman £100,000, the court was told.

Kharouti kept his boss informed about the plan and was told it should involve a ‘double tap’ shot to the head and chest.

Despite a delay over transport for the hitman, the men worked on alternative solutions even arranging the sho0ting near to the proposed gunman’s home.

The alleged hitman was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murd£r in the early hours of June 3, 2020, which the defendants were unaware of.

Kharouti increased the offer to £120,000 but an EncroChat user trying to locate an individual for him said the price should be no less than £200,000, the court was told.

Harding, who had previous convictions for drugs and false documents, was arrested at Geneva Airport in Switzerland on December 27 2021 and extradited from Switzerland.

Kharouti was extradited from Turkey to the UK on June 25 last year.