Tag Archive for 'naughty step'

NFN? On the naughty step

Published
by
NL
on 19/11/2009
in Various (non-housing)
. 1 Comment

May I introduce Mr Trevor Hobden, lately of Canada House Partnership, Grammar School Road, North Walsham, Norfolk and lately a solicitor. Mr Hobden is to be noted for his balanced approach to billing.

Mr Hobden has been struck off the roll and will have to close his new firm, Convey First in Norwich, because of his dishonest (and failing that, grossly negligent) actions. A few samples of Mr Hobden’s billing:

£1,500 was removed from the legacy of one couple when the appropriate bill would be £650.

One estate was charged £13,571, and the money was taken from the client’s cash in 14 transactions without a bill being sent.

The estate of Mr Roy Ellis was charged more than £8,000 in four separate transactions between November 2004 and April 2005, removing all its remaining cash assets, even though the file was dormant.

To investigators and the SDT, Mr Hobden, an equity partner at the time, claimed his bills on the Ellis file were for ‘reviewing’ work already done by retired partner Gerald Goodley and were his ‘best guess’.

When asked if ‘You would look at Mr Goodley’s work and decide whether he had under-billed or not?’ Mr Hobden replied: ‘That would be one of the ways of putting it.’ Or, as the SRA advocate put it ‘You billed just enough to reduce the balance to zero.’

When he was first questioned by investigators Mr Hobden said he had not been properly trained to cost work and said he weighed the file in his hand. That is Mr Hobden, the 47 year old equity partner.

naughty stepGiving evidence to the tribunal Mr Hobden said: ‘I felt I was justified’ but admitted his behaviour was ‘careless.’ The SDT disagreed, finding him guilty of taking money from a client account in respect of costs without delivering a bill, taking money which was not properly due to him, overcharging a client and failing to give clients proper information. He was struck of the roll for dishonesty. However, Mr Hobden can take comfort that somehow, perhaps incredibly, he was cleared of having compromised or impaired his integrity. So, he behaved dishonestly, but with integrity.

Now, let me just pick up this file. Hmm, nearly put my back out. Must be at least an £8K bill.

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Way beyond the Naughty Step

Published
by
NL
on 07/09/2009
in Various (non-housing)
. 0 Comments

Some private landlords treat tenants as a nuisance. A sitting tenant can get in the way of a quick deal or reduce the value of a property on which the landlord is hoping to make a quick buck. Thanos Papalexis found himself in this situation when Charalambos Christodoulides, the resident caretaker of a derelict warehouse complex in Kensal Rise, refused to leave, potentially causing problems for a £2 million property deal. Mr Papalexis didn’t resort to illegal eviction, though. He had another solution for the problem presented by Mr Christodoulides.

He had him killed.

In fact, Mr Christoduoulides was tied to a chair, tortured, then strangled.

Mr Papalexis, of Palm Beach, Florida, besides being a callous murderer, appears to have had a number of issues with adequacy, some of which may have led to the killing.

For starters, there was the fact that he wasn’t a very good property developer at all. He desperately needed the money from the warehouse sale because he had made heavy losses on another development in Holloway (in 2000! How did any property developer make heavy losses in 2000?) and was paying £60,000 a week on a bridging loan.

And then there was his confession in 2004 to Rebecca DeFalco, a Florida based prostitute/porn actor/’high class call-girl’, with whom he had an affair. He told Ms DeFalco that he had strangled a man who got in his way. The competency issue arises because a) he confessed to someone unlikely to be wholly trustworthy and b) because this may be the only true thing that Mr Papalexis told Ms DeFalco, as he spent the rest of the time telling her he was a spy who worked for MI6 and the CIA, presenting her with a rosary supposedly removed from the hands of his mother’s exhumed corpse ‘to make her feel special’ (as one does), and, of course, telling her the old favourite that he and his wife ‘had an understanding’, which came as news to his wife.

We won’t go into the ‘wild sex parties’ at a rented Florida mansion, but even there Mr Papalexis managed to bring in a note of failure, telling the court that there had only been one such party. (This is not in any way to be confused with the fundraiser attended by Hillary Clinton that Mr Papalexis had also held at the mansion.)

The police were after Mr Papalexis for years, and in 2006 he was extradited from Florida to face trial for the murder of Mr Christodoulides, whose battered body had been found in a basement in the derelict Kensal Rise site. Mr Papalexis was found guilty last Friday and stands revealed as a truly vile specimen of humanity.

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On the naughty step

Published
by
NL
on 30/07/2009
in Various (non-housing)
. 0 Comments

naughty step badge For this Naughty Step, we’re going trans-atlantic. A warm welcome to the Step for Horizon Group Management, a property owner/management firm from Chicago.

Horizon cannot be said to lack a pioneering spirit (or, as we shall see, a snappy way with a soundbite, catastrophically counter-productive, but snappy). For Horizon are the first firm to bring a defamation claim against a tenant, for a tweet on Twitter.

what is twitterFor those of you looking puzzled or slightly anxious at this point, Twitter is the terribly au courant micro blogging service in which anyone can post a message of up to 144 characters, which will instantly be read by anybody ‘following’ them. Do try to keep up.

For the dedicated, the tweet archive – for yes, in a sickeningly cutesy way, these sub messages for the terminally short of attention span* are called ‘tweets’ – is searchable.

What had this tenant done in 144 characters or less? Amanda Bonnen, for it is she, had tweeted:

Who said sleeping in a mouldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon really thinks it’s okay.

This, it seems was enough for Horizon. No matter that Ms Bonnen had all of 30 followers at this time (her acccount has since been deleted). No, Horizon felt itself aggrieved, nay positively hurt, by the very idea that there might have been mould in the apartment.  As the company said:

no mould was ever found in her (Ms Bonnen’s) unit and was one of several that experienced an overnight leak during roof repairs in late March 2009

In view of that, they should probably consider themselves lucky that British Telecommunications plc v Sun Life Assurance Society plc [1996] Ch 69 and s.11 Landlord & Tenant Act 1985 doesn’t apply in Chicago.

But, rather than ask Ms Bonnen to delete the tweet, or even contact her about it, Horizon reached for its lawyers. As CEO Jeffrey Michael charmingly put it:

We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organisation

Or perhaps a sue first, think later kind of trigger happy landlord. Consider that this was the tweet that at most 30 people saw, and that no-one else would see unless searching twitter archives for ‘Horizon’ when they meant ‘Horizon Group Management’ and being prepared to wade through the many thousand mentions of ‘horizon’ till they found that one and then have their view of the company significantly changed.

But now, by being the first to sue for a defamatory ‘tweet’ which allegedly contained injury in less than 144 characters, their name is everywhere, all across the interweb, mostly in connection with mould and all about suing their tenants. Top work chaps. Even if you get your $50,000, was it really worth it?

* The British law bloggers tweeting contingent excepted. Sometimes 144 characters worth of brevity is the soul of wit. Or follow Charon QC for a wine driven Verfremdungseffekt, where the answer to the question ‘what are you doing now?’ is as likely to be ‘invading France’ as ‘interviewing Lord Falconer’.

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On the naughty step – on tour

Published
by
NL
on 17/01/2009
in Allocation, Housing law - All and secure-tenancy
. 0 Comments

Nearly Legal’s naughty step has recently taken the complicated, slow and interrupted trip from Norwich to North Wales. It is is with reluctance, several changes of train, and a painful recovery of repressed traumatic memory that we now find ourselves in the East Midlands.

Yes, Nottingham, home of Robin Hood, who stole from the rich to give to the poor. Or, alternatively, home of the (now ex) director of operations, Tyron Brown who gave a larger council home to the (subsequently suspended) vice chair of the ALMO holding all former council properties, Chris Burnell.

In fact redistribution of wealth was going on on a dramatic scale in Nottingham between 2003 and 2005, as Council properties were ‘allocated to people linked to housing officers’ outside of the allocation scheme ‘ahead of a significant number of needy applicants’.

Some properties were allocated outside the usual system, then given extensive repairs before being sold under the right to buy. In other cases, priority under an allocation scheme was bypassed.

Sure, there are always a few problems, but how extensive was the corruption here? The Audit Commission found that between 2003 and 2005:

Around 700 council housing offers – 10 per cent of all offers – were made outside the normal waiting list system during the period concerned. It appeared the points system had not been applied correctly for another 2,000 offers.

So that is 2,700 offers out of 7,000, or roughly 39%, between 2003 and 2005.

To be extremely fair, it should be noted that these problems pre-dated the establishment of the ALMO in April 2005, and have so far only been found to continue until early 2006, including the time when the vice chair of the ALMO got an extra bedroom or two.

So, it appears that some 39% of allocations between 2003 and 2005 in Nottingham were potentially outside a lawful allocation scheme. Some of these involved council officers, their friends and relations getting properties, priority repairs or unjustified transfers.

The Audit Commission’s report, published on 14 January 2009 said that:

three officers had been responsible for more than half the restricted offers of housing. One of those three has since been dismissed.

Eh? Two are still there? Still, experienced housing officers are hard to find, so keep the ones you have – bit of retraining… There might be more of a shortage of housing officers now the police have apparently been called in. Happily, we are assured that this can’t happen in Nottingham any more…

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On the Naughty Step – guest post

Published
by
NL
on 10/01/2009
in Housing law - All and Unlawful eviction and harassment
. 0 Comments

[In a bit of an innovation, we have a guest writer for a naughty step post. My grateful thanks to M for a cracking post....]

You get the distinct impression with some that it’ll take a bit more than being placed on the naughty step for them to see the error of their ways. So it seems with the former landlord Steven Dickens. Dickens, together with his partner Yasminah Jhurry, was found guilty at Knutsford Crown Court at the conclusion of a seven week trial on multiple counts of mortgage fraud whereby £690,000 was illegally obtained. They now face the possibility of a confiscation order and jail sentence.

naughty step badgeDickens built up a large property portfolio to become one of the largest private landlords in North Wales. He operated at the lower end of the market, buying up HMOs and letting them to benefit recipients. Unfortunately, Dickens’ seemingly inexorable rise was funded by dodgy mortgage applications, in which he supplied bogus references, lied about his employment and income, and claimed he would be living in the properties. Dickens even claimed on one application to be selling double glazing when he was actually serving time for violent disorder.

Having, in the words of Judge Stephen Clarke, built his housing empire on “the shifting sands of fraud” one might have thought the budding buy-to-let entrepreneur would have kept his head down and concentrated on quietly paying off the mortgages. But not Dickens. He had his own style of getting things done, which owed more to Rachman than Octavia Hill. He quickly became notorious locally as a landlord who routinely threatened and intimidated his tenants. Local housing agencies became used to a steady flow of tenants complaining of damp flats, exorbitant utility charges, faulty gas appliances, and non-return of deposits. Tenants waiting for Housing Benefit claims to be processed told of how they were threatened with being physically removed from their homes if the rent wasn’t paid come Friday.

Unsurprisingly Dickens became a problem for Conwy County Borough Council, on whom the responsibility often fell for re-housing those fleeing harassment and poor conditions. However few of the victims were willing to confront Dickens in the courts.

But Dickens‘ arrogance was to prove his downfall. First, he had the dubious honour of becoming the first landlord to be the subject of an ASBO for harassment and threatening unlawful eviction. During the trial the court heard evidence Dickens had threatened local authority officers, boasted of knee-capping a man, and offered a housing benefit officer £20,000 for information on former tenants who owed him money. Dickens’ novel response to the ASBO application was to threaten the local housing authority that he would make all his tenants homeless.

Following the ASBO, in an apparent bid to influence the outcome of planning applications for his planned café businesses, Dickens indicated applications might instead be submitted for sex shops. Somewhat bizarrely, we were granted an insight into his thoughts on the judiciary when mannequins appeared in a Dickens’ shop front window dressed in saucy attire and judges wigs (scroll down to 6 Nov “Welsh Wind“). (Ever the diplomat, Dickens struck a conciliatory note. He said he would rather have a coffee shop than a sex shop. The council subsequently approved the planning application for the coffee shop).

Such hilarity was short lived however. Within weeks of the ASBO being handed down, Dickens unlawfully evicted a young single mother, resulting in an eight week stretch. A conviction for breaches of Gas Safety Regulations followed, a rare example of the Health and Safety Executive issuing proceedings against a residential landlord.

While displaying complete disdain for the authorities, Dickens had not figured on North Wales Police conducting a lengthy investigation into his mortgage affairs.

In December 2005 a High Court order appointed a receiver, giving them responsibility for managing Dickens’ properties and business interests. Dickens subsequently placed his properties up for sale by auction, but was denied access to the profits pending the outcome of the mortgage fraud prosecution.

Dickens, Jhurry and Dickens’ mother June (who pleaded guilty to a similar offence on the first day of the trial relating to the family home), shall be sentenced on 2 February. I suspect there will be few of his former tenants with much sympathy for the disgraced wannabe gangster tycoon. Those who were made homeless might be forgiven for hoping he’ll now suffer the same fate.

M.

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On the naughty step

Published
by
NL
on 11/12/2008
in Allocation, Housing law - All and secure-tenancy
. 18 Comments

Please welcome to the naughty step the head of housing for Norwich City Council, Kristine Reeves, along with other council officers. Why? Some pernicious housing policy or dodgy choice based letting scheme? No. Ms Reeves took a rather more personal interest in housing allocation…

Greyhound Opening was a sheltered housing scheme from the post-war years, situated in the city centre. Featuring 25 small adapted homes around a green, with tree shaded gardens, this very heaven for John Betjamin was designated for redevelopment into 100 flats and houses, on the recommendation of, well, Kristine Reeves. The occupants, hitherto paying £69 per week rent and living alone by requirement of the tenancy agreements, were decanted into old people’s accommodation around the city several months ago.

And then? Demolition? Securing of the properties? No.

A couple of months ago Ms Reeves, together with other council officers – half of them from the housing department, moved into the properties. Yes, Ms Reeves, who owns a house and earns c.£52K a year, is paying £47 per week rent for one of the properties.

The properties were advertised on the Council intranet, apparently without approval by Councillors. Not only the rent has changed. Ms Reeves reportedly shares the property with Graham Ross, whose role in the housing department is to increase private sector tenancies, and other officers reportedly co-habit, despite the previous sole occupancy requirement (and the single beds).

Ms Reeves, door-stepped (or should that be entry-ramped) by the Times, had a novel defence.

This approach ‘continued the rent roll’, she claimed, gliding over the reduced rate. In passing, market rents in Norwich city centre apparently run at £350-£750 per month. Naturally, the officers living there saved on security costs. And of course, this wasn’t much of a perk

From here, this looks like a nice scheme. It looks a bit Toytownish but these are not fit-for-purpose units at all. The bedroom doesn’t accommodate a double bed. It’s not well insulated — I can tell you they are really very cold. You couldn’t swing a cat in it.

Poor Kristine, having to live in such substandard accommodation. Oh, wait a minute.

And, of course, the properties couldn’t have been used for homeless accommodation because “it wouldn’t be permanent housing”. Naturally, Norwich is stuffed with disability-adapted temporary accommodation.

Apparently Norwich Council are examining the way the property was allocated to Ms Reeves and chums. One might suggest that, should a suitable interested party present themselves, the Administrative Court might also examine the allocation. Anyone?

[Edit: And coming soon on the step - Beresfords. Once I have calmed down.]

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On the Naughty Step

Published
by
NL
on 08/10/2008
in Assured Shorthold tenancy, Housing law - All and Possession
. 7 Comments

Very firmly esconsed on the step are Sutton Estates, managing agents on Merseyside. These charmers came up with the idea of putting notice boards outside the homes of tenants in rent arrears, proclaiming it to be the home of a ‘rent dodger’. Sutton Estates believe this to be an effective and reasonable way of getting people to pay their arrears. Perhaps sensing that some people might be a little, how can I put it, ‘unhappy’ about this approach, one landlord, Pat Slattery, whose property is managed by Sutton said “It’s not a medieval witch-hunt. The signs will not apply to hardship cases, but there are people who take the rent paid to them by the Government and do not pass it on”.

Sutton’s managing director, Mr Heffey, took a rather more robust view, saying “They can avoid us, but not their neighbours. Now, every time they walk in and out of their door, the neighbours will be laughing at them”. And, in fact, it turns out that people suffering genuine hardship would end up with a sign attached to their home, as Mr Heffey said “For someone who calls us, explains that they are having problems, we would not persevere with this if they are suffering difficulties.” So they get the sign put up, then have to call the managing agents, begging them to take it down.

Now comes the fun bit. Just how many offences are Sutton Estates/the landlord committing here?

Libel and/or harassment have been raised, as have incitement to assault and breach of Art 8 privacy. I’d add breach of covenant of quiet enjoyment and possible breach of data protection rules. Any other suggestions?

Any readers in the north west fancy bringing this nonsense to an end? I reckon it could be done on a CFA, if not legal aid.

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On the naughty step

Published
by
NL
on 01/07/2008
in Various (non-housing)
. 20 Comments

Having discovered that I am the receipient of John Bolch’s coveted post of the month award for the last Naughty Step post, it seemed like time for another. Given that the award was only received due to the unreasonable delay of Geeklawyer in delivering his Blawg Review (caution NSFW and likely to leave you pleasured but having lost all self-respect), it seemed appropriate that this time it should be ‘barristers’ behaving badly on the step.

First up, John Wilmot, barrister, who has just been sentenced to 5 years for VAT fraud, after having conducted his defence in person from the cells, while refusing to come into Court.

Wilmot, imaginatively, claimed to have sold four Boeing 747 jet engines to a contact in Iraq for £117.5 million and sought to reclaim £17.5 million in VAT. The non-existence of the engines or deal was a minor hiccup in his otherwise routine claim to HMRC. He had laid, or rather made, a careful trail of evidence: invoices from a company in Croydon (who had never heard of him and didn’t deal in second hand aero engines on this scale and who apparently used redundant Argos VAT numbers); and details of shipping via a cargo ship (which was carrying beans, not jet engines).

The contact in Iraq? Well, the contact, Mr Al Majari, was never forthcoming, but Wilmot claimed he had (and I love this detail) met him at a Chambers garden party. Now which Chambers was it? Various articles cite him living and working at Temple Chambers in the City, but this is just an address, not a set. Anyone know? Google isn’t my friend in this.

Next up, a not criminal but morally, shall we say, debatable barrister, Mr Barclay Littlewood, late of ‘training at Grays Inn’ (which, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I take to mean that he never had pupillage and is not and never was a practising barrister). Mr Littlewood is ‘Chief Operations Director’ of UKessays and founder of Academic Answers Ltd. I was prompted to consider Mr Littlewood by Charon QC’s podcast with Prof Geoffrey Alderman and by this article in the Grauniad.

Mr Littlewood runs an online factory providing essays for undergraduate and postgraduate students. He thus profits, apparently very well indeed, from human stupidity, laziness, ignorance and greed. Wait, I hear you object, how does he differ from the entire legal profession in this? He doesn’t, and it is not for this reason that he is on the Step. No, Mr Littlewood occupies the Naughty Step for the sheer buttock-clenching, cheek chewing odiousness of his and his setup’s hypocritical blather.

Plagiarism is an academic and professional offence – hello Raj Persaud – and it is massively on the rise amongst students. Mr Littlewood runs a service in which, for a price between £120 to £16,000, one can have written for one an undergraduate essay or dissertation or Masters dissertation. (Prices double for a guaranteed first, up to the £16K).

Aware of the obvious implications, Mr Littlewood’s website is at pains to point out that it isn’t offering these essays for the purposes of passing them off as your own. Not at all. These are ‘model answers’, for up to £16K. (No links, for the obvious reasons, but from the UKessays site).

[I]f you use our model answer in the same way that you would use a journal, newspaper article, question and answer study book or past paper, there is absolutely nothing dishonest in what you are doing.  Our service can be used honestly.  If you do your own 100% original work and your own research, using our answer as a guideline, then this is no different from finding a journal article that deals with all the points you need to make in your essay

But sadly, disappointingly, some people will abuse this generous service:

We do understand that some students will use our work dishonestly.  This is because there are a lot of essay companies who permit students to simply pass off the work as their own, and so a minority of students confuse us with those companies and assume we offer the same service.  We also know that because our work is 100% original and plagiarism free, there is little we can do to regulate that misuse.

Ah yes. These model answers are guaranteed plagiarism free, so that they will not fall foul of plagiarism checking services used by Universities. UKessays is so proud of this fact that at the very top of the home page, they trumpet their ‘£5000 no plagiarism guarantee’. Given that elsewhere on the site, they claim that a first class degree over a 2:2 is worth ‘a million adjusted for inflation’, a £5000 payment for completely screwing your academic prospects seems just a little, well, cheap. But never mind that, because there is nothing at all hypocritical in offering a plagiarism guarantee for your ‘model answer providing service’, nothing at all. Mr Littlewood will tell you so:

If I wanted to debase the academic system I’d have done it by now, and I wouldn’t just have 2 super cars.
I ‘d have 3 Ferraris, 6 Lamborghinis and a Bugatti Veyron for special occasions.
Try ringing ukessays.com and telling us you want to use an essay to cheat with and see what you’re told, indeed you’re likely to get a better lecture on plagiarism that any University could give you. As I’ve said before I turn away thousands of pounds a week due to my ethics, so I can’t see how they can be in question.

And you can tell Mr Littleknob is ‘a barrister’ from the same post

The key [...] is how it’s used, the act or actus reus of buying or reading an essay isn’t plagiarism, it’s the mens rea that counts, how its it used and with what intention.

This is, of course, utter gibberish. How the essay is used is actus reus, not mens rea and I would submit that the requisite mens rea could safely be inferred from the act of handing in one of these essays without mentioning one hadn’t actually written it. I trust that Mr Littlewood doesn’t actually turn his hand to writing a ‘guaranteed first’ law essay for his service from time to time.

But will he submit the essays written for students to the plagiarism detection services, this being the obvious solution to their mis-use? No. Or not until:

Universities [...] promote us as the legitimate research aid to students.

That said, he claims that UKessays has

extensive measures to prevent the dishonest minority from using our service

These extensive measures apparently being, like the US military, a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. But such is Mr Littlewood’s sense of injustice that until the Universities see sense and promote his service:

if there is some unethical use that manages to slip through undetected I’ll consider it part payment for the thousands of honest users they deter every year (through their misinformation) from using our service.

You do that, Mr Littlewood. In the meantime, you’ll forgive me for considering you to be a loathsome, self-serving hypocrite and strongly suggest that you do nothing but stand against this wall until the revolution comes.

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On the naughty step

Published
by
NL
on 12/06/2008
in Various (non-housing)
. 37 Comments

The family firm.

It has such a reassuring sound, redolent of values of client care handed down through the generations, and the energy of youth brought under the careful supervision of wisdom. The very best traditions of the local small firm, a foundation stone of the community.

Or not.

Karim Solicitors, consisting of Imran Karim (40), supposedly senior partner, his sister Saira (39) and their mother Shamim (65) have all been struck off the roll in one fell swoop, after leaving a trail of dishonesty proceedings and panicking liability insurers behind them.

Exhibit A, Zurich Professional Ltd v Karim & others, (see page 3 of this pdf) in which Zurich sought, successfully, to avoid liability on claims for misappropriated funds by clients on the basis that the claims arose out of dishonesty and/or fraud, primarily by the first defendant, Shamim Karim, who was found to be the controlling power behind the firm. For the detailed factual background to this case see paras 28 – 33 of this account [PDF]

Exhibit B, the SDT, following a decade long investigation, struck all three off the roll (in their absence). Dishonest use of clients’ money, to the tune of £840,000 was not the only problem.

The money, Imran said, had been spent by him on “a Rolex, loose women and drink”. However, his sister Saira took a more prudent approach and invested her money in business ventures, including the ‘Miss Nude UK’ beauty contest. [See BBC story here, featuring Saira as 'founder']

Sadly ‘Miss Nude UK’ proved to be the beginning of their downfall, when in 1999, company documents for the ‘beauty contest’ arrived at the Law Society in an envelope from Karim Solicitors, who then denied all knowledge.

Imran and Saira had put all the blame on Mommy Dearest, who had been found to be the dominant force in Zurich v Karim, but, as in that case, the manner in which the brother and sister had corruptly permitted Shamim to run the firm was enough to damn them. All three were culpable. Interim costs order of £75,000 made.

The Karims have the right to appeal the SDT decision and are apparently intending to do so.

[edit 13 June] This just gets better. See this newspaper story. Imran had a serious premiership footballer and Krystal habit. Saira set up Miss Nude UK with Nick Reynolds, the son of Great Train Robber Bruce ‘Butch’ Reynolds. Despite being on Sky TV, Miss Nude UK wasn’t enough to rescue the situation, particularly as Saira had also also put money into a ‘failed music business’.

Mind you, there was the alleged apartment in New York and the ‘large home in Esher’ (Ahh, fragrant Esher) to console her. Document shredding and claims of being authorised to take mortgage holders money (Eh?) were not enough of a defence.

After a series of raids beginning in 1999 investigators found £450,000 had been misappropriated from the proceeds of a house sale belonging to clients Mr K and Miss D.

A further £390,000 had been taken from mortgage cash advanced by Northern Rock to Mrs Binu Govindan, who sold her home in Brighton Road, Purley and was buying a property on Woodcote Valley Road.

I’ve said it before and will say it again, it is always the conveyancers you have to watch…

defendant
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