For tens of thousands of men the medicines offered by Ashish Halai and his gang appeared to be the answer to two of their most worrying and embarrassing health concerns: impotence and baldness.

But the unsuspecting customers, buying what they thought were Viagra and Propecia, were victims of one of the most ambitious and elaborate of counterfeiting crimes. Halai and his associates were buying fake drugs from Chinese suppliers for as little as 25p a tablet and selling them for up to £20.

Details of their vast network – stretching from Britain to Hong Kong, Dubai, the US and the Bahamas – emerged yesterday as justice finally caught up with the conmen.

In the largest drug counterfeiting case in Britain, and after a trial lasting more than seven months, Halai, 33, was jailed at Kingston Crown Court for four and a half years as one of the key players in the plot.

From his £1 million home in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, he helped to mastermind an operation in which fake pills were produced at secret factories in China and Pakistan and smuggled to the US and Europe. The rewards, the court was told, were “immense”.

The investigation, the largest conducted by the Medicines and Health-care products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), uncovered profits of more than £2 million. The agency said that this was the “tip of the iceberg”.

“The geographical spread was global and the financial rewards were immense,” Sandip Patel, for the prosecution, told the court.

Halai and his wife, who is a qualified pharmacist, had run a legitimate pharmacy in Bayswater for many years. But when the business was sold he continued to use the name as a front to sell herbal weight-loss aids. In 2002 he started to deal in counterfeit Viagra, selling to customers via email.

Soon he had made a deal to supply a Mexican company based in the Bahamas with around 600 tablets a month.

“He was the linchpin of the British arm. He was the epicentre, he negotiated the smooth running of the whole operation from his base in North London,” Mr Patel told the court.

Halai quickly developed a network of contacts to help him to smuggle the tablets into this country and ship them on to the Bahamas. Packages, many of which were shipped with companies such as DHL, were marked as containing vitamin supplements for dogs to avoid detection.

Sentencing Halai, who had pleaded guilty in April to four counts of selling fake medication, Judge Nicholas Price said: “The drugs were so skilfully packaged that it required the trained eye to detect they were counterfeit.”

Three other men were also convicted in the trial, reporting restrictions on which were lifted yesterday and which began in January. They included a salesman, Gary Haywood, 59, from Leicester, who was convicted of 11 charges, including conspiracy to distribute fake trademarked medical products and money laundering.

Posing as a former employee of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, Haywood used his property in Spain to help to oversee shipments to Britain and in six months smuggled about 500,000 fake Viagra tablets into Britain. Each tablet was sold for £12, bringing in about £4.9 million.

Ashwin Patel, 24, a student of Ken-sal Rise, Northwest London, Halai’s brother in law, and Zahid Mirza, 45, a businessman of Ilford, East London, were also found guilty. All three will be sentenced at a later date.

The case dates back to 2003 and 2004, when counterfeit batches of Viagra and Cialis, impotence drugs made by Pfizer and Eli Lilly, were seized while being smuggled into Heathrow and Stansted airports.

The MHRA immediately launched an investigation which alerted them to a major manufacturing and smuggling operation. Samples showed that the medicines contained about 90 per cent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients found in genuine tablets. Most of the fake pills were sold via the internet, but some found their way into chemists were they were sold as prescription medicines.

In 2003 the MHRA contacted the US Food and Drug Administration, which seized 8,000 packages of Viagra in Miami. Then, in July 2003, MHRA officers seized more than 120,000 fake Viagra tablets.

Several other individuals in the case will face a retrial early next year.

They include a physician, Georgio Patino, 47, from Guadalajara, Mexico, Alpesh Patel, 30, from Kingsbury, London, a pharmacist, Rajendka Shah, 48, from St Albans, Herts, and a businessman, Ketan Mehta, 55, from Grove Park, London. Mr Mehta was cleared of two charges of conspiracy to supply counterfeit medicine.

Cashing in on men’s private fears

Viagra

— Impotence drug, known by generic name sildenafil citrate made by Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug company

— Sales estimated to be upwards of $2 billion per year

— Global market for impotence drugs is worth more than $3 billion

— 152 million men suffer from mild or moderate impotence, a number that is expected to double by 2025.

— It is estimated that 1 in 10 ten British men suffer from erectile dysfunction at some point. It is associated with age, heart disease, high cholesterol and blood pressure, diabetes and smoking

Source: Sexual Dysfunction Association

Propecia

— Hair loss treatment made by Merck of the US

— Propecia has sales of about $400 million per year

— Known by the generic name finasteride, it is one of only two drugs licensed by US regulators for the treatment of hair loss

— A once daily pill, treatment is required for three to six months before evidence of stabilisation of hair loss

— Male hair loss is caused by increased sensitivity to male sex hormones (androgens) in certain parts of the scalp, which make the follicles shrink

— Other treatments include steroids and photochemotherapy

Source: netdoctor.co.uk

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