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

by Michael Gillard

  Page had not paid Robin any return on his initial investment but had the front to ask for a £3000 loan for one week for which he offered to pay £500. Robin understandably thought it was in his interest to help complete the barns and borrowed the money with ease on his credit card. Page did pay the return on time, but then asked for a further £1000. Again, Robin obliged, but this time Page didn’t pay.

  By summer, Robin was feeling fitter and offered to work for free at the barns doing some plumbing, his job before becoming a marine. Within days of being on site Robin was very concerned for his family’s huge investment, now standing at almost £250,000. ‘The operation is a farce,’ he told his brother and Page.

  The discovery alarmed Robin further because before he went to war he had introduced fellow marine Lee Howarth to Page. Howarth then brought in his father and sister, who were prison officers.

  Page was offering 60 per cent returns on a two-month investment. The Howarth family ended up investing £22,000 in 2005, all transferred to Laura’s bank account.

  Lee Howarth’s younger sister had just bought a house so she was able to borrow more money from her bank to invest in the barns. But when the return wasn’t paid she had to borrow from her family to pay back the second loan.26

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  Jimmy’s officer Mark Copley had moved his wife and two young children into one of the unfinished barns in November 2004. It was at the same time that the anti-corruption squad had started investigating Page’s financial activities. But no one from the squad came to warn Copley before effectively shelving the financial inquiry in March 2005.

  By summer, the Copleys had decided they definitely wanted to buy Barn C, despite concerns about the quality and safety of the work, in particular the kitchen wiring.

  Scarborough Building Society had valued their barn at £315,000. In conversation with their solicitor, the couple tried to explain the unusual financial arrangement they had struck with Page around the purchase. On 3 August, the solicitor wrote expressing concern that the Copleys had already paid a £155,000 deposit directly to Page and said he would have to refer the matter to the building society, which was offering them a £160,000 mortgage. In the same letter the solicitor asked for details of how and when the deposit had been paid.

  It was a very unorthodox transaction. The Copleys had paid cheques into the bank accounts of Laura and her brother-in-law, Paul Ballard, the recently sacked builder, rather than to ULPD. When the solicitor heard this he warned the couple they had ‘no legal protection’ and the so-called contract, which wasn’t drafted by lawyers, could be worthless.

  Matters escalated when Scarborough’s money-laundering compliance officer phoned Mark Copley expressing concern about discrepancies in the figures supplied. There was a suspicion that the size of the deposit paid to Page had been inflated by £45,000.

  It hadn’t, but Copley put down the phone and composed an extraordinary letter to Page. The money-laundering compliance officer, he wrote, wanted ‘details of the amounts we moved to you, when and the account numbers [and] the contract details. I think they suspect that we are using dirty money as part of the cost of the barn and the “extra” £45,000 is dirty and you are laundering it into the deal.’

  Copley then asked if they should give Scarborough copies of the contracts for the £155,000 deposit or whether Page wanted them ‘changed at all, or backdated’. In a further extraordinary paragraph, Copley wrote that the two policemen needed to ‘tell the same story’ to the banks and authorities if it was Page’s intention to put £45,000 from another deal through the barns one.

  Page was already stalling the Copleys over selling them the barn. He didn’t address the letter but played for time, as ever, while trying to get the other two barns finished for sale so he could pay Mortgage Guarantee and some of his favoured investors.

  The Copleys remained on side for the rest of the year. In fact, Mark Copley was an enthusiastic advocate of the project to other officers from Jimmy’s.

  Richard Humby had only been at the palace for a few years. He had come there from the river police and before that had been at an unremarkable south London police station.

  Richard and his wife Beatrice were enthusiastic players of the property market with several buy-to-let flats in the Kent area.

  He recalled receiving reassurance from Copley in early 2005 that the Essex barns were the real deal. Humby said it gave him the confidence to sign an initial contract with Page that was witnessed by their Jimmy’s colleague, Surinder ‘the Turbanator’ Mudhar.

  Humby put in £20,000 for six months with a 30 per cent return and £15,000 over one month at 15 per cent. Although an experienced buy-to-let developer, he did not find these types of returns on property to be too good to be true. Page, he claimed, had assured him the returns would be paid from ULPD’s rental income on the properties it owned and ‘other bits and pieces’.

  Humby steadfastly maintains that he never knew spread betting was behind these high returns. However, he did no due diligence to see if ULPD owned any properties, which it didn’t, nor did he visit the barns before releasing the money. He was also happy to transfer the £35,000 to Laura’s NatWest Clippers account and Fahim Baree’s Halifax account, who then transferred £12,750 of it to CMC, although there is no evidence that Humby knew this.

  Soon after paying returns on these initial two investments, in April Page arranged to come to the Humbys' home to pitch a new development opportunity in Esher, Surrey. It was the same one he had talked to Mahaffy and Mudhar about the previous year. One of the selling points Page used was to claim that the property was sought after by a Chelsea football player and others, such as Ashley Cole, lived nearby.

  In the Humbys' kitchen, Page produced a ULPD brochure featuring the Surrey property, Meadway, as a ‘magnificent 6000 sq ft residence set in one of Esher’s most sought after private roads’. He spoke confidently of plans to develop the property into a six-bedroom cottage called Ivy House.

  ‘When it’s finished, Dick, ULPD will be able to sell it for £3.25 million. This will leave a net profit after capital gains tax of £771,000,’ he said.

  The Humbys didn’t take long to bite and invest £100,000 without visiting the Meadway site. Humby relied on the word of another police officer who went there and told him, ‘I don’t know how Paul does it, it’s a great site, there’s a crappy bungalow to be pulled down, the site is big and looking at the rest of the houses down the road they must cost millions’.

  The truth was the owners of Meadway had recently, in principle, accepted Page’s upped offer of £1.3 million but no finance company would give him a mortgage so a few months later they pulled out.

  The Humbys were promised a 40 per cent return on the £100,000 investment over a year. No solicitors were involved and the money was once again transferred into the bank accounts of Fahim Baree and Laura.27

  It hit their accounts a few days after the Windsor wedding of Prince Charles to Camilla Parker Bowles on 9 April.

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  Key investor James Mahaffy, from Jimmy’s, seemed to be curbing his enthusiasm for Page by the beginning of 2005. It wasn’t that the cash returns on his £125,000 investment weren’t coming his way. Far from it. Brown envelopes had been frequently trousered in the almost three years he had been involved with Page’s spread betting and property syndicate.

  But when he asked for all his money back in January, Page was momentarily floored. ‘Fucking MAPS,’ he cursed under his breath. Mahaffy’s nickname, short for ‘my armpits stink’, was not one he used to the face of such a major investor and introducer.

  Page pulled up £15,000 in cash, no doubt from some hapless new investor, and promised Mahaffy another £30,000 would be transferred to his bank account by the time he returned from a holiday in the Maldives.

  It wasn’t, and Mahaffy called to complain when he got home. Page mollified him with another £15,000 cash envelope. It was enough for him to feel he could ring up Mahaffy on 1 April, the day he sacked Ba
llard, to ask for more money.

  ‘I’m in the shit, Jim,’ Page levelled with the sun-tanned Royal Protection officer. ‘I need money to pay building bills on the barns.’

  Mahaffy relented and gave him another £20,000 in cash. It was the last money he invested.

  The next month, Mahaffy’s world fell apart when Wendy, his wife, became very ill. He thought she might die. Sitting by her hospital bed, Mahaffy took a call from Page offering a new investment opportunity, a flat for Mahaffy’s son. He declined because all his efforts were on his wife’s recovery.

  Wendy did get better over the summer and Mahaffy promised to get the rest of their investment back. However, Page was elusive and full of excuses. Mahaffy sent emails telling Page how ‘very pissed off’ he was getting, but curiously signed off one angry email ‘Jim x’.

  Page was moved enough to give Mahaffy another £5000 and offered to fit an expensive kitchen for ‘free’.

  ‘Why don’t you just give him the fucking money,’ Laura shouted at her husband when he told her that the Mahaffys had accepted the kitchen offer.

  ‘They’ve been on the look-out for a new kitchen and I need to get MAPS off my back. I don’t have all his fucking money.’

  Laura cared because it was her best friend’s husband who was going to fit the kitchen.

  Like ‘Gripper Cars’ and ‘Gripper Airways’, ‘Gripper Kitchens’ had the desired effect of stopping Mahaffy from pulling out in 2005. Yet despite his reservations since January about Page’s schemes, Mahaffy continued to act as an introducer. Three new Jimmy’s officers invested over £190,000 following Mahaffy’s advocacy.28

  Gerry McCallion had only been in SO14 for a few months when he first heard about Gripper. In January 2005, Mahaffy told him that Page was looking for new investors and introduced them when the Range Rover rolled in to deliver brown envelopes. McCallion and Page spoke briefly at Stable Yard, where the changing of the guard takes place. Page said he would visit him at home.

  On 27 January, Page arrived in his Range Rover with a Louis Vuitton briefcase full of architect plans for the Meadway development in Esher, Surrey and sales material for various properties in Stratford, east London.

  ‘I’m looking ahead of the Olympic bid,’ he told McCallion pointing at the Stratford bumph. The location for the 2012 Olympics was due to be announced on 6 July. ‘So if we get it, I’m quids in with all the properties I’ve bought in Stratford. In any case, with the property market the way it is I can still sell them for a profit.’

  Of course, Page and ULPD didn’t have any other properties other than the heavily mortgaged and financially troubled barns development. But McCallion didn’t know that when he agreed to invest £30,000 for one year at 25 per cent.

  Page explained he would have to transfer the money to his wife’s Clippers bank account. McCallion was unaware that Clippers had gone bust, but he was one of the few policemen to ask why his money was not going to ULPD.

  ‘It will speed up the transfer and won’t flash up with the bank. I use Laura’s hairdressing business account to spread out the amount of money I’m dealing with,’ Page replied. ‘We’ve got a bank manager on board,’ he added for effect. ‘He’s part of the set-up.’

  Throughout the sales pitch, Page’s mobiles were constantly ringing. McCallion noticed that sometimes he would check the number and ignore it or answer and promise to call back.

  ‘If you come on board, mate, you’ll get holidays as a reward. My friend from school is sorting that out,’ Page continued. ‘I personally will deal with my police investors as family. Others will deal with outside investors.’

  McCallion bit and joined the high-yield family, investing a total of £68,000 in 2005. The chatter about the returns, cash bonuses, holidays and kitchens was enough to lure McCallion’s girlfriend, a physiotherapist, to also invest £50,000 for three months at 20 per cent. The money came from selling her house.29

  McCallion’s contract was signed and witnessed by another new colleague from Jimmy’s who Mahaffy had also introduced to Page during one of his visits to the palace.

  Duane Williams recalled Mahaffy telling him that his relationship with Page was good. There was no mention that MAPS was thinking of asking for all his money back.

  When they met, Page lied to Williams that he was able to offer such high returns because he was going to make a large profit on the barns. ‘At that time there was a lot of property programmes on the television encouraging people to venture into the property development world and what he was telling me seemed plausible,’ Williams explained. ‘The investments made sense to me at that time when house prices were going up and people were making money on property’.

  Williams declined the safe investment option of a 15 per cent return once the barns development was completed in favour of an unsecured 20 per cent return paid quarterly. He thought such returns were not unbelievable because in 2005 the TV schedules were full of programmes such as Under the Hammer, Location, Location, Location and Moving Abroad. The media, he said, were pushing up house prices.

  Like others, no legal advice was sought before investing and no visit was made to any site. As with Humby, Williams said he relied on the word of other Royal Protection officers.

  Over several months in 2005, Duane Williams transferred £35,000 to Clippers, Fahim Baree, Anjam Khan and a Bristol investor’s bank account. Only one small payment went to ULPD. He also gave Page some cash. Some of the money came from his daughter’s account. Some was borrowed as a car loan from the bank.30

  Finally, there was Phil Williams, a veteran of Jimmy’s since 1994. To him, Page was a good laugh and a bit of a wide boy, which explained his nickname ‘Gripper’, a police officer who Williams thought had once gripped the rail – stood trial – for an unknown offence.

  In January 2005, Williams had a pile of cash to invest after selling his house and moving in with new wife Linda Jolly, a financial analyst. She loved property programmes, especially Grand Designs, the reality show that film couples developing a dream home in a unique style.

  Later that month, Williams was on duty when he spotted Page parking his Range Rover at St James’s Palace. Gripper was delivering a cash return to an officer but stopped to whet Williams’s appetite about Meadway, the Esher bungalow development he pretended to own.

  ‘There’s going to be a state-of-the-art gym, swimming pool, tennis court and security gates to keep out the riff raff,’ Page enthused.

  Williams later got a brochure from Mahaffy, which he took home to discuss with his wife. It was exactly the sort of development they were looking to get involved with and invested £10,000 for six months for a 25 per cent return.

  Every so often, Williams would see Page at the palaces and ask him how the grand design was going. He came to learn that Gripper had a catchphrase: ‘Things are going good.’

  After six months and not a return in sight, Page was still able to persuade Williams and his wife to invest another £28,500 for one year at 30 per cent paid quarterly. This time the contract declared that the money would be invested in ULPD, the property company with no viable property, no accounts and no funds.31

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  Laura was strapping four-year-old Samuel into the Range Rover when one of the mothers from the local playgroup approached her with some good news. The two women shared a love of clothes and an opportunity had come up to indulge their passion for haute couture.

  ‘A friend of my husband is willing to lease us his shop in Grays with no deposit or rent for the first few months while our boutique finds its feet,’ she told Laura.

  A week later, in early August 2005, they took the shop and went on a spending spree to decorate and buy stock. A candyfloss sign in gold went up outside announcing the imminent arrival of Wicked Wardrobe.

  Laura splashed out £90 per roll of gold and pink wallpaper, £1000 on an antique wardrobe, a burgundy chaise long with gold painted wood and hangers made of crystal beads to match the crystal chandelier. Her favoured clothing s
uppliers were Love Sex Money and Coronets and Queens.

  Page had voiced his reservations about Wicked Wardrobe’s location – Grays was hardly an up and coming part of Essex where genuine Versace, Prada and Armani was flying off the rails. He was also doubtful of his wife’s business head, which was a bit rich for a man so deluded about his own financial acumen.

  That said, Page knew his wife needed a project of her own, beyond their five boys and running his errands. Even he could see their relationship was under great strain. She was reluctantly more involved in ULPD business as sole signature for the company’s NatWest account and Page was sending her to various M25 service stations to drop off cash when he was too busy or avoiding his clients.

  Laura got to know many police and civilian members of the syndicate and resented most of them. They got the money in brown envelopes while she had to put up with an absent husband or one who might as well have been because he was so obsessed with gambling while at home. ‘I was growing to hate the TV being on all day and that music for CNBC or Bloomberg,’ she told me.

  For the first time, her husband was starting to appear desperate and pathetic to her. When he lost, which was often, he would become depressed and ask if her mum could lend him some cash. Laura had even taken to hiding money in a handbag in the wardrobe, until Page found it one day and without any sense of irony called her ‘a devious little cow’.

  He had begged her to open two accounts with bookies William Hill because his were too much in debt.

  ‘No. You’re not getting me into more shit,’ she told him.

  ‘Go on, love. You’ve got to,’ he pleaded.

  She relented, he set it up and Laura got to choose the password – Vogues. To keep her happy, Page part-funded Laura’s Wicked Wardrobe dream to be in the fashion game. He knew his wife had a history of bad credit and spending more than she earned. In fact, a debt collector was chasing an old online shopping bill and court costs while the couple set up the new boutique. Yet despite the strains on their relationship, they were emotionally dependent on each other and still bonded by family, loyalty and love. They had ‘gelled’ from the moment they met, Laura told me. And as the relationship grew, she realized that her jealousy was an anxiety that Page would go off with another woman, when in fact he had no wandering eye and was very protective of anyone disrespecting their bond.