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

by Michael Gillard

  Investors do not fear losing money as much as they fear solitude, by which I mean taking risks that others avoid. When they are caught losing money alone, they have no excuse for their mistakes; and most investors, like most people, need excuses. They are strangely happy to stand on the edge of a precipice as long as they are joined by a few thousand others.

  Mahaffy had heard on Jimmy’s grapevine a false claim that Page’s father had died so he decided to leave any further contact until after Christmas.

  On 28 December, he drove to Page’s home. Mahaffy rang the bell, but no reply came. A short while later, Page emerged at a small side window.

  ‘Can I come in, Paul? We need to talk,’ Mahaffy asked softly.

  ‘I can’t open the door, Jim, there has been a burglary of the keys. Laura will be back in a few hours’ time.’

  ‘I’m going to solicitors, Paul. I don’t believe you anymore.’

  Mahaffy drove home and composed with his wife an ‘or else’ letter to Page which he resolved to hand deliver straight away. A few hours later, as he parked in the cul-de-sac once more, Mahaffy spotted Laura at the front door. She looked very stressed and very angry. ‘It’s a holiday, Jim. Why are you coming here? Leave us alone!’

  ‘I need to speak to Paul.’

  ‘He’s not well. He’s lying down. He’s got a headache.’

  ‘What about my money?’

  ‘The account’s been frozen, Jim.’

  ‘If I can’t talk to Paul I’m going to solicitors,’ Mahaffy responded waving the letter in his hand. But Laura slammed the door, so he slipped it through the box and left.

  Laura let her husband have it. He was in the sitting room watching television and drinking another can of Stella Artois. ‘Oi, Walter Mitty?’ She shouted, using her new nickname for Page. ‘He said he’s going to lawyers. I can’t have this, Paul. Not another year of this shit.’

  ‘I know love. I’ll change his nappies. It’ll be fine.’ But inside, Page knew his confidence had gone and Laura could sense it too.

  ‘I was losing the plot,’ he told me. ‘I had one more game in me, that I can turn things around, that I had the command and respect of my peers.’

  Not Mahaffy. When he got home he emailed Page that legal action was the next step in the New Year.

  Had Page been honest in 2005 and admitted the scheme was insolvent, he was right in thinking there was still enough loyalty, stupidity and greed among investors to try and rescue the barns or at least give non-believers a realistic Christmas repayment plan, as would be the case in any company insolvency.

  Instead, Page chose lies, evasion and fraud throughout the winter of discontent. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, he was ‘determined to prove himself a villain’.

  Chapter 14

  The Bristol connection

  The end of 2005 saw the third hub of investors from Bristol fare no better than the Royal Protection officers and BAT boys.

  The same pattern of misplaced trust, reckless greed, deceit and recrimination was also a feature of the West Country arm of Page’s operation: large sums of money had been invested in various of his schemes without due diligence; some of which investors had transferred to the bank accounts of complete strangers with no questions asked; returns beyond the dreams of avarice and financial logic had been offered and not met; and money was being secretly siphoned off for hopeless spread betting and sports gambling.

  At the centre of the Bristol connection was Steve Phillips, a thirty-something catering company salesman married to a police officer’s daughter. He became Page’s Bristol agent and was responsible for bringing in his family, friends and then a group of business contacts that together invested £400,000 since January 2005 and ended up losing most of it.

  It was Adam McGregor who introduced Phillips to Page. The catering salesman had come to London in January 2004 to see McGregor’s police-officer girlfriend, an old family friend of thirty years or more from Bristol.

  It was no coincidence that Page turned up at McGregor’s house in his Range Rover and the three men went to the barns and other sites Page claimed he owned or had interests in. Phillips was further impressed when McGregor showed him proof of his own substantial investments with the fellow SO14 officer.

  ‘Any investment you make, Steve, I will cover with the equity in a flat I own in Cheshire,’ McGregor told him. ‘We can also offer you returns of 25–30 per cent.’

  Phillips had spare cash to invest from a recent property sale but asked for time to think about it. Weeks later he was on the phone striking a verbal agreement with McGregor to invest £25,000 for one year at a 30 per cent return.

  Phillips said he was ‘mainly’ putting money into the barns development. The clue to what else he invested in perhaps lies in what his friend McGregor did with the £25,000. Phillips wired it to McGregor’s bank account, who transferred all of it to the CMC account he had opened for Page.

  A year later, in February 2005, Phillips was back at McGregor’s home where he received a cash return of £6000 and a cheque for £26,500 from Laura’s NatWest bank account. The catering salesman was weeks away from getting married to Nicola, the daughter of a retired Avon and Somerset Police chief inspector. She had recently re-mortgaged her home and had spare cash to invest. The couple made the fateful decision not to bank the £26,500 cheque but re-invest with Page. They put in an additional £13,500, increasing their investment to £40,000 at 30 per cent over six months.

  Nicola didn’t know in what they were really investing. Page, however, knew that her husband was hooked. He saw him as a soft-touch country bumpkin to be rumped for cash. The Bristol connection was also a way of getting his irate London investors off his back.

  Page was soon on the phone to the newly-weds asking if they knew any locals also willing to invest. With gusto, Phillips approached family and friends using his salesman skills but no ULPD paperwork to punt the exciting opportunity to ‘make some money’.

  His cousin Paul Phillips worked at Lloyds Bank and was impressed by the returns that the Bank of Page was offering when compared to his own financial institution. The royal policeman was so desperate for cash that he offered to cover the monthly repayment of a £20,000 loan he encouraged Paul Phillips to take and also to pay him a 25 per cent return in six months.34

  The cousin considered these terms ‘too good to miss’ and took out two loans online. He happily transferred £20,000 to ULPD and recommended the investment to a bank-worker colleague and others who put in a further £26,000 at 20 per cent. One of them had also borrowed from his bank and was promised that the monthly repayments would be taken care of by Page.

  By the summer of 2005, Steve Phillips considered himself an ‘employee’ of ULPD. He retained his salesman job but had negotiated with Page a 10 per cent commission for bringing in others.35

  It was not just property schemes that Page punted to Phillips. He also approached his new lieutenant with an investment opportunity supposedly involving a Premier League footballer. Phillips was content not to know the details. He felt the investment was ‘strange’ but asked his mum for £10,000. She stumped up the cash on the promise of an amazing £2600 back every month.

  Page was working the same line on a few Jimmy’s officers. He’d told them that an unnamed African Blackburn Rovers player needed £400,000 to complete a mortgage or financial deal and there was money to be made from the short-term loan. Why a footballer who earned more money than God and worked less would need a bridging loan made no financial sense at all.36

  Steve Phillips was also happy to involve his sister, Leanne, in yet another strange request from Page. This time he wanted to use her Lloyds Bank account to receive £10,000 from a complete stranger – an innocent investor – and then transfer it to Laura’s ULPD bank account. Phillips convinced himself that Page was simply seeking a way of avoiding bank transfer fees. Leanne was happy because she was promised £250 for the service. However, because her account was overdrawn only £9000 was available for onwards transf
er. She called Page with a little nervousness to tell him the situation.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Keep the grand. Just make sure you withdraw the £9000 and put it into Laura’s account,’ he told her. What to Leanne must have looked like the generosity of a successful gentleman businessman was really a desperate mask for Page’s degenerate gambling and fraud.

  Like lieutenants McGregor and Baree, Steve Phillips was also treated to a holiday courtesy of ULPD’s bespoke travel agents. The couple had wanted to go to Hawaii but because Nicola was now pregnant they couldn’t fly. Instead, they took a long weekend at Disneyland in Paris by Eurostar. Nicola recalled running out of money during the break. ‘Steve rang up and spoke to Laura. [She] said, ‘No problem’, and transferred £500 into our account.’

  After Paris, Page took Phillips in a convertible Mercedes to show him a number of sites including Meadway in Esher, Surrey. Page also signed some blank ULPD receipt of funds forms and legal contracts and encouraged Phillips to seek investment for the development back home. The contract contained the following wholly misleading sentence: ‘ULPD Ltd confirm that there is no risk to investors’ capital and guarantee to pay the agreed returns as stated.’ Phillips left for Bristol confused about whether Page actually owned the Esher site, but appears to have made no effort to check for himself before punting it to friends and neighbours.

  He told his father-in-law, the retired Avon and Somerset police chief inspector, about the possibility to make money. Page met Jeffrey Thomas during a family trip to Bristol that summer. He showed him various development plans and gave a very confident pitch to the old copper. Page knew from Phillips that Thomas had a rental property for sale and was considering investing some of the profit in his development scheme. So he pulled out all the stops and put in an offer for the house in Laura’s name.

  Meanwhile, Phillips had persuaded his wife to use a £20,000 bank loan for a loft conversion to invest with Page for a very short term at 20 per cent. The money was transferred to the bank account of Anjam Khan from BAT, no questions asked.

  Page had promised to cover the monthly interest payment on the £20,000 loan. He also invited the couple to London for another all expenses paid weekend. They drove down in a Porsche Cayenne, which Page had given to Phillips for three months courtesy of Gripper Cars. Part of his job was to look for development opportunities in the West Country for which he was promised an extra £500 for every site visited.

  In London, the couple stayed at a golf hotel near to Lakeside. ‘Page paid for everything,’ Nicola recalled. ‘We had en suite rooms, champagne when we arrived, and they took us out for a meal at a floating Chinese restaurant, which Laura paid for in cash, which she carried in her handbag. I recall this because when she opened the bag it was full of cash.’

  Page, of course, wanted something else in return. Phillips agreed to open a CMC account in his wife’s name for Page to use. Phillips couldn’t open it in his own name because his credit record was poor at the time due to a problem with a previous girlfriend.

  Page told them it would help to move money around the syndicate. The fact that spread betting was blazoned all over the application form they had filled out and unmissable on the regular emailed statements apparently didn’t make the couple question this absurd claim.

  Phillips said Page had claimed that the CMC account was a ‘tax-free account he could put money in for me to access to give people their money back or returns which he would top up so I didn’t have to go to him for money … I never did any transactions that weren’t directed by him. I didn’t know how the online CMC account worked.’

  Nicola Phillips added:

  As far as I was concerned this was some sort of Internet banking account that Paul knew about. It was something to do with the stock market and Paul said he would build up the money and Steve could access it. As far as we were concerned this was all above board and fine. I didn’t have too much to do with the account. I knew Steve saw that money was going in from the statement we received. We did see the money going in but then it would disappear.37

  The twenty Bristol investors who ended up investing £400,000 were never asked by Steve Phillips to transfer their money straight to CMC. Court documents show that some of it was transferred to his HSBC bank account, which he then sent to the CMC account in his wife’s name.

  Phillips had recently offered his uncle, David Jones, a 25 per cent ‘family rate’ of return if he invested with Page. Jones didn’t want to use his voluntary redundancy money from his old job as a factory worker so he took out a £20,000 personal loan from Tesco. On the form he said the money was for home improvement because he suspected that if he gave the real reason – to make money from a Royal Protection officer’s syndicate – his application would have been denied. The money was wired to Fahim Baree, who transferred it to the CMC account he too had opened for Page.

  Jones was none the wiser. However, almost immediately he received a £5000 return, which dissipated any latent concern. Page also offered him £250 to allow money to go through his Lloyds TSB account and onto ULPD. He agreed, no questions asked. Then came an amazing offer to make £2000 on a four-day loan. At the time Page dangled this carrot, Jones’s wife was dying of a brain tumour. The couple had saved a ‘nest egg’ of £8000, which Jones transferred to the ULPD account, again without any contract.

  After weeks and not a return in sight, when Jones finally started digging around online he discovered that certain ULPD documents had not been filed with the official register, Companies House. Immediately, he alerted his nephew that he now believed the whole thing was a con. Phillips tried to reassure his uncle, but Jones thought his nephew didn’t want to believe it was all going wrong. In the end, Phillips promised to speak to Page, who mustered faux fury at the suggestion of criminality and said he would ring his agent’s uncle to protest. But Jones was in no mood.

  ‘You’re a conman,’ he told Page down the phone.

  ‘No, I’m a legitimate businessman,’ the policeman replied.

  ‘Then why haven’t certain company rules been followed?’

  ‘The matter is in hand,’ said Page.

  ‘Paul, I know you are a cop.’

  ‘Listen, mate, you know nothing and I could find out all about you in twenty minutes.’

  Detective Sergeant Mark Davey of Avon and Somerset Police’s Serious & Organized Crime squad had started to take an interest in Page’s scheme after a tip off from Steve Phillips. The Bristol agent had not turned supergrass and Sergeant Davey was not about to arrest Page for fraud. On the contrary, the detective and his wife had decided to invest their joint savings with the Royal Protection officer who they believed was on sabbatical.

  Mark and Elaine Davey were friends of the Phillips. The two wives worked in the same local government social services centre and Mark had served with Nicola’s chief inspector father at Thornbury police station. The Daveys were looking to move house and were persuaded to use their £10,000 seed money sitting in a Nationwide cash ISA account for a three-week investment in ULPD at 15 per cent. Sergeant Davey thought this was a lure to make a more long-term investment but was apparently happy to use the opportunity for a quick buck, reassured that other Phillips family members were investors and Page was a fellow policeman. That said, when they handed over their seed money the couple had never met Page, had no contract and saw no paperwork specifying which ULPD property was yielding such incredible returns in the short term.

  As 2005 drew to a close and no money appeared, Davey asked Phillips for an explanation. He was told the ULPD bank account had been frozen because of an Inland Revenue inspection. Like other Bristol investors given the same excuse, another Page invention, the Daveys agreed to wait.

  The entire Bristol hub had no idea that the London end of the operation had collapsed, or that there had been a major fall-out between Page and the Royal Protection officers and boys from BAT.

  Phillips was equally unaware and had taken a day’s unpaid leave from his catering sales j
ob to drive to London in December on the understanding that Page had money to pay returns. Phillips waited all day only to be fobbed off by phone that one of the BAT boys would transfer the money. It never arrived.

  Days before Christmas, he returned to London and collected a cheque for £30,000 from Laura that was drawn on her bank account. Before cashing it, he wrote out five cheques to a select group of out of pocket friends and family in Bristol.38 They all bounced because the £30,000 cheque was no good. Page simply explained it away by claiming he had to use the funds for another matter.

  Page was playing on Phillips’s greed and willing. He needed to deceive his West Country lieutenant that all was thriving in London in order to sucker in new investors for gambling money and to pay token returns to some of his old ones: a classic Ponzi fraud.

  £ £ £

  When Page heard the doorbell ring that February morning in 2006, he was too hung-over to worry. With resignation he shuffled in his dressing gown to the front door to find Gerry McCallion, a Jimmy’s officer, staring at him.

  ‘Hello mate,’ said Page with false bonhomie.

  ‘Hello, Paul. You’re a hard man to reach. Can I come in?’

  Page ushered McCallion in while trying to remember the lies he had told him.

  McCallion and his girlfriend had invested £118,000 over a one-year period that was now up. Page had lured them in with talk about the development in Esher, Surrey and property near the Olympic site in east London, neither of which he owned. On the plus side, his drink-addled brain remembered personally delivering one brown envelope with £1375 in cash to McCallion’s house and giving Mahaffy another £3500 to hand over at Jimmy’s.

  McCallion wasn’t used to seeing Page in such a dishevelled state. The Money God was normally suited and booted when rolling into St James’s Palace in his black Range Rover. McCallion couldn’t decide if Page was depressed or hung-over.

  ‘You look rough,’ he told him.