THE legal battle to recover the cash swindled by canoe death fraudsters John and Anne Darwin begins this week.

The couple, who conned insurance companies out of £250,000 after staging Mr Darwin’s death in an accident off the North-East coast, could see assets confiscated under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

A one-day hearing will be held at Leeds Crown Court on Wednesday to see if any of the so-called “canoe cash” can be recovered.

Darwin has been excused from attending, but it is believed his wife will appear.

The couple embarked on a new life in Panama after Darwin faked his death in March 2002, by vanishing off the coast of Seaton Carew, Hartlepool.

In November 2007, he handed himself into a London police station claiming he was a missing person suffering from amnesia.

But the five-year scam fell to pieces when a photograph of the pair living it up in Panama appeared on the internet.

Darwin was jailed for six years and three months after admitting his role in the fraud, and his wife for six-and-a-half years.

Their trial heard how the couple made fraudulent life insurance and pension claims after Darwin’s disappearance.

Teesside Crown Court heard the plan to hoax insurers and pension schemes into believing he was dead was hatched as the couple faced losing their seafront home in Seaton Carew in 2002.

His wife convinced the police, a coroner, financial institutions and even their two sons, Mark and Anthony, that he had drowned.

He watched TV news of his “death” while holed up in a Cumbrian B&B, according to the memoir he has allegedly smuggled out of jail.

In the “missing” five years, he hid in a bedsit they owned next door, took the identity of a dead baby and then tried to start a new life in Panama after his wife cashed in a life assurance policy.