For Queen and Currency: Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace

by Michael Gillard

  ‘Hello, Paul,’ said Copley, a small, slightly built man. ‘I hear you are interested in stocks and shares, commodities, that sort of thing?’

  Page looked up and turned off the Teletext. A property renovation programme was now on the screen.

  ‘I’d like if I had the knowledge and courage to do something like that myself,’ Copley continued.

  ‘I’ve done a few renovations of property, Mark. It’s piss easy,’ Page replied.

  ‘Oh! Are you a DIYer?’

  ‘No. Fuck no. I’ve got a brother-in-law who’s in the building trade with his own company.’

  ‘That’s handy.’

  ‘Yeah, well, eventually I’m going set up a company of my own and take a career break.’

  Page had done exactly that when he next saw Copley at Jimmy’s the following year. He told Copley about the three-barn conversion in Essex. ‘Here’s a brochure. I’m looking for substantial investments from SO14 colleagues.’

  The pitch could not have come at a more opportune time. Mark and his wife Sufia had a fixed-rate mortgage on their house in Harlow, Essex which was coming up for renegotiation in August 2003. Property prices being what they were, the couple had worked out they could re-mortgage at a new rate, pay off most of the original loan and borrow £65,000 against the increased equity, no questions asked by their bank.

  The couple thought the barns development was a good investment opportunity. In September, Copley told Page he was in. That month, the couple transferred £45,000 to the ULPD account, and on Christmas Eve another £20,000 was deposited.

  The Copleys saw themselves as conservative investors. Yet they had transferred £65,000 to ULPD for the barns project on the strength of the plans Page had showed them and without visiting the site, which was only a short drive from their home. They also had no contract with ULPD.

  The deal they were promised was spectacular. Page offered the Copleys a 30 per cent return in quarterly payments of £4500 for their £65,000 investment. The couple had also agreed to invest a further £90,000 from re-mortgaging Sufia Copley’s home before she married Mark. This money was a down payment for one of the barns when it was completed.

  Strangely, Copley paid most of the £90,000 between March and April 2004 into Laura’s Clippers account rather than to a firm of solicitors. Some he also paid directly to Paul Ballard’s business account, the discharged bankrupt builder Page was using to convert the barns.

  That April, the Pages invited the Copleys to sign a formal agreement to represent their £150,000 investment. Mark Copley drafted the agreement instead of a lawyer. Both couples signed the document, which recognized that the Pages would refund the £155,000 if the Copleys didn’t buy one of the converted barns. Meanwhile, the couple would continue to receive £9000 in returns for the remainder of 2004.

  Page made sure these were paid on time. It had the desired effect, because the Copleys decided to definitely buy one of the barns. They visited the site and chose Barn C. Scarborough Building Society had valued it at £315,000 when completed. The Copleys resolved to raise the remaining £160,000 through a mortgage.

  On 15 November 2004, the couple and their two young children moved in to their new home before it was completed because Page had offered them free rent.19

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  Sikh constable Surinder Mudhar left a career as a structural engineer to join the Met Police in 1994. Five years later, he was posted to Jimmy’s, one of the few ethnic officers in SO14 to wear a turban.

  One day in September 2003, Mudhar was on duty with Mahaffy, who was boasting about the returns from his investments with a BP officer nicknamed Gripper. ‘It’s good business,’ Mahaffy enthused.

  Mudhar was aware the property market was booming and was encouraged that Richard Humby, an officer with extensive buy-to-let interests, was also thinking about investing with Page.

  ‘I’d like to speak to him,’ Mudhar told Mahaffy, who set up a meeting at Jimmy’s.

  Days later, Page parked his Mercedes in the palace and went to the control room, where Mahaffy and Mudhar were waiting. The officer manning the control room continued monitoring the palace security networks while Page launched into his now well-practised spiel.

  ‘I’m going on a career break soon to run my property company, ULPD. At the moment I’m running a syndicate for officers. We’re renovating some barns in Essex. Depending on how much you invest with me I’ll give you a good rate of return. You can’t lose, Surinder.’

  Page left the control room to hand out some cash returns and commissions for those who had introduced others to his scheme. Mudhar was interested and assured by the investment of other SO14 colleagues. He took home a ULPD brochure to discuss with his wife of sixteen years. Any investment would have to come from their joint savings account.

  ‘People at work are already involved with Page. He’s one of us, Manjit,’ Mudhar told his wife.

  ‘But I’m happy keeping our money in the bank. It’s safer,’ she replied.

  ‘Yes, but we can earn more money out of property than just letting it sit in the Halifax or Barclays savings account.’

  ‘I’m worried we will lose it, Surinder,’ she told him.

  Mudhar reported to Page that his wife still wasn’t sure. Gripper left it a few days before coming to their house to pitch her the property scheme. He arrived in his flash car carrying a laptop, the brochure and architectural plans for the barns.

  ‘Are you going back to the police after your career break?’ Manjit enquired after the introductions.

  ‘No, not at all. I’m doing so well,’ Page replied.

  Manjit explained that their savings had been put aside for their two young children’s education, wedding and for a house. She said her husband had been saving since he had started working at seventeen.

  ‘Manjit. I understand you need to be sure but it’s as safe as houses. ULPD will cover your investment. Listen, I was talking to an estate agent down in Surrey, there’s a property there I’m interested in developing in Esher. This agent says to me the property, when done up, will either go to Arabs or footballers. He let slip that Chelsea’s Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink was interested in the same development.’

  The Mudhars were impressed with Page. However, they decided to start small and transferred £5000 to the ULPD bank account on 25 September 2003. Page had offered a 20 per cent net return of £1000 in a year. Mudhar was one of the few who had a contract. But the couple had invested without visiting the barns site.

  Over the next two years, the Mudhars would put in a further £80,000 under a contract in which Page offered increasingly incredible rates of return from 30 to 90 per cent. They took out various bank loans, cashed in their premium bonds and dipped into the Barclays joint savings account. The money was transferred to ULPD or Laura’s NatWest Clipper account.

  However, on two occasions they handed Page £20,000 in cash. The couple met him by a golf club off Junction 3 of the M25, half way between their homes.

  The Mudhars were also interested in buying a property they had visited in Orpington, Kent. Page claimed that ULPD was going to develop the bungalow, which suited Manjit as she was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. The involvement of the Copleys in a similar arrangement made the couple feel safe and protected. ‘I was happy to invest as other colleagues were involved and I trusted their views,’ said Mudhar.

  In time, he would allow his Barclays account to be used to transfer syndicate money to other officers or receive cash from complete strangers. He appears to have taken a small cut with Page’s blessing for the service.

  The couple were sufficiently impressed with Page and his operation to recommend ‘the great opportunity’ to a close family friend who had a large amount of cash after recently selling his house.

  Randhir Suri, an accountant nicknamed Pinky, was earning low interest on the money. After being faxed the ULPD brochure from St James’s Palace, he decided to invest £70,000 in Page’s various schemes on the promise of up to 30 per cent returns. So
me money was transferred to Laura’s bank account without a contract or receipt, simply because he trusted his friends. Suri raised other money by taking a home improvement loan from the bank.

  Gripper and Pinky did meet once at a pub in west London. He came away thinking Page was a ‘good salesman’ and trustworthy because he was a policeman. Pinky was happy to give Page money to gamble on the stock market and property when he saw thousands of pounds coming back to him in returns.

  The Mudhars were not left out of ULPD’s apparent largesse. Gripper, who sometimes referred to Mudhar by his SO14 nickname, ‘the Turbanator’, also rewarded his police colleague with a free family holiday to Florida.20

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  ‘It was like a circle of money coming in and coming out. I could click my fingers and someone would put fifty grand into a total stranger’s fucking account on my say-so. To me one hundred grand became nothing,’ Page recalled.

  Between 2003 and 2004, the first two years of ULPD’s existence, he had taken an estimated one million pounds from police and civilian investors. This did not include the £217,000 that Mortgage Guarantee had started releasing for the barns conversion since May 2004. Not all of the finance company’s money went to his builder brother-in-law for materials and labour; some of it was diverted to the spread-betting accounts or recycled to pay returns to investors.

  Page realized he had to widen ULPD’s property portfolio, or at least the illusion of one, if he was to attract more investors. There simply wasn’t enough money in the barns for everyone.

  That month, a Kent-based estate agents put Page on their list of buyers looking for properties with a £900,000 to £3 million price tag. Page also started putting in offers for properties while trying to negotiate multi-million pound loans from specialist finance firms.

  In July, a £1.1 million offer was put in to develop an Essex scrapyard into Berwick Hall. In November, Page offered £1.2 million for the Esher property – 33 Meadway – that he had already mentioned to the Mudhars and Mahaffys.

  His own finances were in a parlous state. He had to sell the family Leytonstone home inherited from his grandparents and force his Aunty Pat, who lived there, into rented accommodation. His grandfather would have turned in his grave that the inheritance was frittered away.

  As for ULPD, it hadn’t even filed any accounts. The problem was none of the finance firms he consulted would lend him the money because he wasn’t able to show them passable financial accounts. Thus, the search for new investors had to continue using the old lures.

  Page told me that by 2005 his betting and property syndicate had spread beyond S014 and into other Met specialist squads (Diplomatic Protection Group, Anti-Terrorism, Special Branch and Firearms); east London police stations (Limehouse, Dagenham and Romford); and other forces (Greater Manchester, Hampshire and Avon and Somerset).

  He said SO14 officers going to Balmoral via Stansted Airport would drop by at chez Page for cash returns to take to fellow policeman in the Scottish police who liaised with SO14 officers protecting the Queen’s castle.

  ‘I was responsible for a machine that was churning out lots of money and it was responsible for people working in highly sensitive areas. It was mega money. Sometimes in my house I’d have one hundred grand laid out on the floor. It was that bad. It got to the stage where we had police convoys, I shit you not, full of money.’

  Chapter 10

  Gripper Airways

  Their friendship began as toddlers at an east London nursery in the early seventies. It ended almost forty years later in a south London courtroom; two broken men squaring up in front of the jury until anger and betrayal gave way to tears and white flags.

  Fahim Baree and Paul Page were born within a month of each other in 1971. They grew up in Leytonstone, forever in each other’s houses when they weren’t hanging out with their gang. Page felt so comfortable around Baree’s family that he called Mrs Baree ‘Mum’.

  The British Muslim family was aware that young Page hadn’t exactly had the best start in life. His paternal grandparents had brought him up since he was six-months old because his mum and dad weren’t able to look after their only child. That’s all the Baree family knew but it was enough to take the young boy into their hearts.

  Page’s grandfather, a successful building contractor, had ambitions for his grandson. He encouraged Page to study and hoped one day he would join him in the building trade, possibly as a draftsman or surveyor. But they both knew that Page was not cut out for academic study. Sport was his thing, especially karate. His grandfather encouraged Page to a black belt at thirteen. Baree remembers his best friend was ‘well liked’ at school and college and even ‘revered within the community as doing very well for himself’ through karate.

  ‘I knew his grandparents better than his mum and dad. My mum and dad were very close to his grandparents. I called them Gran and Grandad, it was that kind of a relationship,’ Baree recalled during a long interview.

  The two boys shared a love of cars. They were the first to get licences and motors and saw themselves as the dominant personalities among their friends. But Page had an edge with his skill in martial arts. He recounted one incident when, as late teenagers, the pair had fought over some real or imagined lack of respect.

  Mrs Baree, a social worker, would on occasion intervene and asked them to make up after one particularly serious fall-out. But the pair maintained a solid friendship thereafter, despite going on very different career paths, one a travel agent, the other an officer of the law.

  Baree clapped Page at his passing-out parade for Essex Police in 1992 and drove him home with his proud grandmother and Aunty Pat sitting in the back seat. But he saw a change in his friend, and not for the good, when he became a policeman. Before he joined the force Page had kept his licence clean, didn’t drink, take drugs, gamble or throw his weight around. ‘He was that clean, squeaky,’ Baree said. He believes his best friend’s mind became ‘polluted’ by what he saw in the police.

  Baree was alarmed at the style of vigilante policing Page was learning at Essex and later in the Met.

  When he got into the police and started training other coppers, then he got a bit of a big head and he told me little stories about what they used to do in the back of the van. No one knew about it apart from the guys who done it. That was his self-justice. As soon as he got in the force and started to do all these things, they just brainwashed him. Seriously, some stories he was telling me about murder [scenes] and what he had to do, and the bodies, I think it [gave] him more hero status, he wanted it.

  Page outgrew Essex, says Baree. ‘He didn’t like policing the beat at Grays. It was just scroats, Gypsies, nothing of interest to him. He wanted more big-time stuff.

  Baree was best man and keeper of the £29 Argos ring when Page wed Laura in 1997. The travel agent was also married with young children. The two couples would hang out, although according to Laura she didn’t get on with Baree’s wife. There was a competitive edge between them, she said, and Laura liked to flaunt her Mercedes and ‘Louis’ (Vuitton) when they socialized.

  Baree was impressed by his friend’s move to royalty protection in 1998 but took his money-making schemes and share trading with a pinch of salt. Two years later and Page was regularly faxing Baree at work with information on property for sale.

  It became more apparent that he was trying to be more like a sorcerer, ‘I can do this, I can do that’, but it didn’t click until he started working and all his money came out and he was driving around in this Range Rover and Porsche. Then my interest picked up and I thought ‘He’s got to be doing something right.’

  So when Page mentioned in late 2002 his idea to set up a property company and develop some derelict barns, Baree was intrigued. The plan was viable and exciting in a booming property market, he thought.

  At the time, Baree believed his friend was a successful spread better. He had no idea about the losses and Page didn’t explain the true reasons why he needed to set up the company or a
dmit that he was starting to burn out. To Baree, the new house in Chafford Hundred, the ‘his and hers’ Mercedes on the drive, the exotic holidays and a prestigious job guarding the Queen were all signs of substance and success.

  The pair drove around Canary Wharf looking for an office for ULPD. The financial centre was booming with testosterone-fuelled trading in toxic mortgage-backed derivatives, followed by jeroboam-sized lunches, cocaine and hookers expensed as ‘research’.

  Bankers saw no dark cloud on the horizon or any conflict about making money from selling a product, which at best they must have known was unsustainable in the long term. The Ponzi-type scheme worked liked this: an investor would be offered a high-yielding mortgage-backed derivative by the same bank or hedge fund that was secretly betting in another market that the toxic product was likely to default.

  The type of men and women celebrated by this banking culture were those with balls big enough to hide huge losses from their bosses when gambles didn’t pay off, wipe their mouths and get back into the casino to quietly recover the position.

  As he drove his Mercedes through Canary Wharf with Baree next to him, Page also felt like a big swinging dick. He had the swagger, the chat, the confidence and trappings of wealth. He too had been let loose with other people’s money without any training whatsoever. He too saw no looming dark cloud or ethical issue about how he was using investors’ funds.

  Instead, Page saw a financial culture that rewarded those taking short-term risk without regard to long-term consequences. In a booming financial market, it is said that traders feel divorced from reality, immune from risk. As Page had already admitted, at this point in his life £100,000 was nothing.

  ‘Are you in?’ the street-smart cop with more front than Buckingham Palace asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said his best friend. ‘I’ll help you out. Give me a title, give me a job, some kind of pay, I’ll come work with you.’21