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Legend has it that in 1993, Rita Sharma set up BestatTravel (BAT) to escape a dead-end McJob. Rahul, her husband, resigned his job as a chartered accountant to help 33-year-old Rita run the new firm specializing in ‘affordable luxury holidays for the discerning traveller’.
Today BAT employs over 70 people in its central London call centre and headquarters. The Sharmas are the sole directors and equal shareholders in the company. It is their main asset, although through clever property investment their fortune in 2003–4 was estimated at £95 million, earning them their first presence on the Sunday Times Rich List.
Their entry among the richest 1000 people in Britain and Ireland said: ‘The Sharmas have resisted City entreaties for a flotation at £60m. They have shrewdly invested in bricks and mortar, so we add £35m for their homes in India and the south of France, their luxurious central London mansion and other property interests and assets.’
The couple shared rankings with Gladiator director Sir Ridley Scott, Dragon’s Den entrepreneur James Caan, Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts and former Take That singer Robbie Williams. They are also stars among the British Asian business community and through BAT donated to the Conservative Party.
Fahim Baree was a trusted senior travel consultant at the firm. He liked his job but was heavily attracted to the idea of working with his best friend.
In early 2003, Baree helped design the ULPD brochure and agreed to be named as the financial director in promotional material. He was not registered with the watchdog, nor did he have his name on any official company documents. There was, however, a verbal agreement with Page that he would receive a 1–2 per cent commission for every investor brought into the business and a higher rate of return on any money he invested himself.
The opaque arrangement suited Baree. He didn’t want to resign from BAT until he could see how ULPD performed in its first year. Page did not see this as disloyalty. After all, his other ‘lieutenant’, Adam McGregor, was furiously selling the new investment opportunity to his family and police friends. So much so, that by the end of 2003, McGregor had brought in over £180,000, a lot of which went into the CMC spread-betting account that Bald eagle had opened for Gripper.
Baree started to change his mind about investing in ULPD when in September that year Page showed him the £510,000 mortgage documents on the barns. He was also aware that the official evaluation suggested there was almost £1 million profit to be made from flipping the property.
Baree worked in an open-plan office and sat next to Anjam Khan, his manager and friend. Khan could overhear the enthusiastic phone calls with Page. It wasn’t long before Baree gave him the sales pitch.
‘He’s a childhood friend of mine that runs this company, ULPD. He’s a police officer at Buckingham Palace. I might leave and make some money.’
But Khan wasn’t interested. ‘All my money’s going into doing up my ’ouse,’ he told Baree in an even broader Essex accent.
By early 2004, Baree still hadn’t decided whether or not to leave BAT. Instead, he opened up a new hub of purely civilian and mostly British Asian investors inside the travel company or connected to it through Khan. By the end of the year this new hub had invested £240,000 into Page’s scheme.
The first to invest was Bimal Lodhia, a 38-year-old Ugandan-born Asian. He had arranged Khan’s mortgage and did the same for Baree.
Lodhia had only been a mortgage adviser since 1999. Before dispensing financial advice he’d worked in a chemist dispensing over-the-counter health products. The property boom had been kind to Lodhia. When Baree came to see him he was living in a big house in Chigwell, Essex, with a Mercedes outside and the trust of many in the local Asian community.
Lodhia was interested in meeting Page and seeing the barns development. He spoke to his friend Paresh Solanki, another mortgage adviser with even less experience, who he knew from insurance work.
Baree drove the two men to meet his partner. It was also Baree’s first time at the barns. Page was waiting in a Portakabin, his alternative office to the Range Rover now that he was officially on leave from BP.
Solanki was impressed by the amount of work going on. ‘This is a family business,’ Page told him as they walked around the site. ‘It’s me, Fahim and my brother-in-law. I’ve taken a break from royalty protection to get into the property game. A lot of police officers have invested in me, including senior ones.’
Solanki had made money in the housing boom since 1999 by buying and selling investment properties, so he knew what was possible, even in such a frothing market. The deal Page was offering him – 25 per cent return – he accepts was ‘phenomenal’ by any standards.
However, Solanki says that he had no idea about the spread-betting side to Page’s operation when he and Lodhia invested. Court documents show that none of the £240,000 invested in 2004 by them or on behalf of others went directly to ULPD.
Lodhia gave Page £20,000 in April 2004. In June, Solanki persuaded his brother-in-law to give him £15,000 for a high-return, short-term unspecified investment. Days later, Solanki invested £20,000 of his own money, which he paid into Page’s Woolwich building society account. A further £25,000 investment in September went to Laura’s Clippers account at NatWest.
Solanki said he received ‘substantial’ cash returns in brown envelopes from Page and Baree for these investments. He also earned a 10 per cent commission for introducing two other investors in 2004.
The more significant of the two was Mubasher Hussain, an IT consultant in his early thirties, who ended up investing £133,500. The money was raised through a £50,000 re-mortgage and raiding his ISA and Tessa savings accounts, he said. Hussain also ‘cleared’ his wife’s bank account to invest in the scheme that Solanki, his ‘trusted’ financial adviser, had brought to him.
Hussain met Page in June 2004 and originally agreed to invest £30,000 for an annual 25 per cent return. He denies having any idea about spread betting until well after all his money had been handed over. ‘At the time the property market was booming. I wanted to get into property. I was dealing with a policeman … There were a lot of police officers involved in this. It was a good investment,’ he later explained.
Hussain’s first investment was transferred to Page’s Woolwich account. The second investment had an altogether different routing. Hussain transferred £20,000 to the Barclays account of SO14 constable Surinder Mudhar. The St James’s Palace officer then transferred this money to Laura’s Clippers account.
Hussain used Mudhar’s bank account on two more occasions to invest a further £35,000. However, the court documents show that ‘the Turbanator’ kept most of this money because it appears Page had told him it was the return on his own investment.
The willingness of police officers to allow complete strangers to use their personal bank account to transfer large sums of money was an extraordinary and foolish feature of this story.22
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By summer 2004, the money-go-round was impressing Fahim Baree, now a key lieutenant involved in dropping off brown envelopes. He said he believed the Pages had bought the barns outright and then borrowed against it to fund the conversion. Yet he also said he didn’t know exactly where his best friend was getting the funds to pay cash returns. He told me:
He would give me money to pay people off every month, [I] didn’t question where the money came from, all cash … Being a novice in that area, I thought, okay well if he is going to get money for the barns [from Mortgage Guarantee] he can pay investors off in that way. Because the land that he bought was only £500,000 and the end value of it was £1.4 million … So I could see obviously there was a big wealth pot there and I assumed that was where the returns were going to be … From that point [ULPD] seemed like a machine that could actually work.
On this account, Baree wasn’t alarmed that the conversion budget would run out if his best friend continued to use it to also pay investors their returns. More detai
ls of what Baree knew emerge from looking at his actions between August and October 2004.
Although still not ready to resign from BAT and join ULPD, Baree decided to invest his own money with Page. In August, he re-mortgaged the flat where he lived with his wife and two children and gave Page £30,000 in cash at a BMW garage. There was no contract just a promise of a 33 per cent annual return, which Page said he would double if his best mate brought in more fresh blood.
Two months later in October, Baree opened a CMC spread-betting account for Page to use. Asked to explain this, he told me:
I set up the account for the purpose of Paul to hedge against it. I’d never used the account. He needed an account to hedge against … He told me he needed three or four accounts to hedge against so that one would go deficit, one would go plus, so he would make money. I didn’t know the ins and outs.
Baree said he initially thought the spread betting was separate from the property side of ULPD.
‘In my head it was a separate thing he was doing. It didn’t click to me to think that he’s using, well, okay, yeah, it’s obvious if he’s taking 30 grand one day and making 40 grand the next, that money’s got to be used for something. It’s not going be used in the building trade. So yeah, obviously, naivety was there at the beginning. But when you think, hold on a minute he’s taken, I mean, I didn’t even know he’d been taking money off other people, but then the next day he’d say, ‘I’ve made 40 grand off the markets’. I thought ‘How did you do that? Where’s the capital come from?’ He goes, ‘So-and-so has given me, invested’.
Page needed Baree to open the CMC account because other spread- and sports-betting accounts had to be closed down after sustaining losses. Page couldn’t use his own CMC account because he was in dispute over a £15,000 debt. The year before he had closed down his joint CMC account with SO14 constable Mark ‘Pretty Boy’ Joyce after losing £35,600.23
The William Hill accounts had also been closed down after sustaining losses. The records show Page bought casino chips worth £173,000 and lost £88,000. He had also lost on the two William Hill accounts opened in his wife’s name.
Baree didn’t know about the losses on these other accounts. But like McGregor, he opened a CMC account for Page and knew his best friend was spread betting while taking investors’ money for ULPD. Baree also allowed investors to put money into his Halifax account, which he then transferred to CMC for Page to gamble. The investors didn’t know.24
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The Queen’s Flight is the name for the fleet of VIP aircraft at the disposal of Purple One and the Royal Family. After a merger with the Royal Air Force in 1995, the fleet was renamed No. 32 (The Royal) Squadron based at RAF Northolt. Purple One and The Firm can charter executive planes to fly the world at an hourly rate picked up by the taxpayer under a royal travel grant allocated by Parliament.
Goldman Sachs, the investment bank earning billions from a derivatives-based scheme that was driving the world economy towards a crash, flew its executives, tame regulators, pocket politicians and key investors around the world in a fleet of private jets fuelled by greed and irresponsibility.
Royal Protection officer Paul Page, another degenerate gambler, thought he too should offer key investors a chance to travel the world for ‘free’ courtesy of ‘Gripper Airways’.
ULPD’s bespoke travel company, BAT, made the arrangements mostly through Fahim Baree and later Anjam Khan. Plane tickets and hotel bookings were generally dispatched to the palace pigeonholes of key SO14 officers, although apparently some would collect the envelope from BAT’s West End offices.
Las Vegas, Florida, Tel Aviv, Paris, Dubai, Thailand, the Caribbean and Australia. No destination was too far, no hotel too ritzy for the select group of investors who Page needed to keep sweet.
‘It’s on the house. We’re flush. He’s been a good investor, never moaning,’ Page would tell Baree, when authorizing the booking.
Page convinced himself that when people gave him money it was his to do with as he saw fit for the greater good of the syndicate. The idea behind the holidays, he told me, was to ‘build up fierce loyalty – I’m looking after you, you look after me’. This type of loyalty bonus was an extension of the secret commissions system he paid those who brought in new investors or who allowed their bank accounts to be used to transfer money around the syndicate.
But in reality, the holidays were also a lure to foster trust and the illusion of success and profit in his scheme. The holidays, like the commissions, were not free but paid for from other people’s money.
Baree said Page never rewarded himself with ‘free’ holidays. However, it frustrated him that his best friend rarely paid on time for others. It was ‘like pulling teeth’. Sometimes, Page would even ask Baree or Khan to front the payment on their credit cards.
But it was not just ‘free’ bespoke holidays on Gripper Airways that Page offered his key investors. There was also a bespoke executive car company that Page used as another investment sweetener – something for the weekend, from a Mini to a Bentley, to please the little lady in your life.
It was in August 2002 during the Currency Club era that Page first started doing business with Arrow Hire in Cardiff. The business was personal. Page was losing a lot of money and had to sell the ‘his and hers’ Mercedes to raise cash. But he also needed to maintain the illusion of success for his SO14 investors who were used to seeing him in a flash car.
Page leased a Range Rover, which became the new mobile office from where brown envelopes were dispensed out of view of the palace security cameras.
His investors would continue to think that the Range Rover and later a Porsche belonged to the Money God. Instead, they were paying over £600 per month for each vehicle parked on Page’s drive, as well as his mortgage and those utility bills he chose to settle.
Craig Gunn, Arrow’s director, knew nothing about the ULPD business. He thought Page was an affable good customer, especially when he started to hire cars for syndicate members. They got on well, despite Page’s habitual lateness paying the hire bill. But the policeman made up for this by providing a very unusual service to Arrow Hire.
According to Gunn, the local Welsh police were not always interested when he reported a missing car. Detection wasn’t that difficult because the cars had trackers fitted to them. But the local police considered recovering the vehicle a civil matter, he said. On two occasions Gunn turned to Page for help retrieving first an Audi and then a Porsche in London.
The Audi convertible was somewhere in the south of the capital. Page said he asked two police colleagues on night duty to keep an eye out for it. When it was spotted, Page turned up with policeman-turned-freelance-repo-man Adam McGregor. Page then called the telephone number on the hire contract and introduced himself as a police officer.
‘You’ve got a short window before this goes beyond an informal resolution. They just want the car back.’
The man agreed and left the Audi as instructed at the car park by Leytonstone tube station with keys under the back wheel.
The story of the Porsche Cayenne was a more complex repossession. Gunn had been in contact with the hirer, who claimed the car was up north. The tracker showed it was in fact parked in east London.
Page picked up McGregor and located the car near a garage in Ilford. A warrant card was flashed and the men inside the Porsche were persuaded it was in their interests to walk away.
McGregor later admitted in court that he had gone with Page to ‘locate some cars’. His general loyalty had been rewarded with a ‘free’ Saab Cabriolet from Arrow Hire. To McGregor it was a ‘thank you’ for investing his family’s savings in ULPD.25
In fact, Bald eagle had gone further in 2004 than Page could ever have imagined. McGregor had opened up a third hub, this time of civilian investors, from the Bristol area.
Page was still the controlling mind of the whole ULPD syndicate. But the system of lieutenants and commissions he created meant others had their own incentives
and responsibility for bringing in investors who he had never met but whose money he was happy to take.
In short, going into 2005 his hedge fund was taking on a life of its own which made Page’s fraud a lot easier to continue, especially as no one in SO14 management appeared to be paying any serious attention.
Chapter 11
The corgi that didn’t bark
‘Holy diversionary tactics, Batman!’ said Robin, watching a group of their men create a disturbance outside the main gates of Buckingham Palace.
‘To the side of the palace, Robin,’ said the caped crusader, leading the way. Batman scaled the smaller perimeter fence, then propped the ladder against the main palace wall and started to climb as armed SO14 officers approached.
‘Holy show-ups, Batman! You’ve breached Buckingham Palace security and beaten all these jokers in uniform.’
‘Watch out, Robin! They’re behind you,’ Batman warned as he edged his way along the ledge towards the famous main balcony from where The Firm wave on royal wedding days.
The Boy Wonder had by now beaten a hasty retreat and was speaking to the assembled media. ‘We are ordinary guys and if we can get in there, anybody can,’ he told the BBC.
SO14 officers had decided not to shoot Batman because he did not appear to be a terrorist. Doubting his super power of flight, however, they moved a crash mat under the ledge while he unfurled a banner. It read: ‘SUPER DADS OF FATHERS 4 JUSTICE. FIGHTING FOR YOUR RIGHT TO YOUR KIDS.’
The stunt on 13 September 2004 by activists Jason Hatch (Batman) and Dave Pyke (Robin) was one of the most memorable security blunders at BP since Michael Fagan gained entry to the Queen’s private quarters twenty-two years earlier.
That Purple One was away on her summer holidays at Balmoral Castle when the Dynamic Duo struck mattered not. The security breach was enough to force Home Secretary David Blunkett to make an emergency statement to Parliament that evening.
Tory MP David Davis, his opposite number, put the incident in perspective. ‘It beggars belief that we have had four major breaches of security in a year. When the threat from terrorism is at an all-time high it is worrying that episodes like this can still take place,’ he told the BBC.
For Queen and Currency: Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace Page 12
