Not everyone Phillips lined up took to Page. One publican listened to the speech and decided it was ‘crap’ and that Page was ‘too much of a wide boy’.
There was also some explaining to do to those Bristol investors who had come into the scheme in 2005 and by the summer of 2006 were still waiting for returns. Page arranged to see some of them at Phillips’s house in staggered half-hour meetings.
One was Andy Boucher, a work friend of Phillips. He’d had a quick and good return on an initial investment, which lured him to put in a further £16,000. Page was profusely apologetic for the delayed returns on this second investment and expanded on the bogus tax-probe excuse.
‘The Revenue investigation is now over, Andy, and ULPD’s bank account is about to be unfrozen so I can start distributing all the returns. It was all a load of nonsense really. They’ve fined me £400 for not keeping my books in order,’ he told Boucher, who left feeling reassured but still £16,000 lighter.
Another concerned punter was local motor trader Adrian Marsh, a neighbour to Phillips’s mum. Page had strung him along for months about his intention to buy Marsh’s house. It was just a ploy to get at a pot of money Marsh and his wife had come into after recently selling a rental property. Page persuaded the couple to invest £20,000 for six weeks at 30 per cent. Marsh sent the money to Adam McGregor’s bank account. He was aware that McGregor was another policeman but unaware that his £20,000 was transferred by Bald eagle to a CMC account.
When the returns never arrived, Marsh was also fobbed off with the false tax-investigation excuse. He put his house back on the market and, while waiting for the taxman to thaw the ULPD bank account, an apologetic Page offered him a free Caribbean holiday with a travel firm he said was ‘in his pocket’.
It was enough to persuade the couple to make another short-term investment of £25,000. ‘They invested £15,000 into my HSBC account and £10,000 into Adam McGregor’s account on the direction of Paul Page,’ Phillips recalled. ‘Paul told me to put £11,900 of this into our CMC account and £3000 as wages and money owed to me.’50
With still no returns in sight or of the sound of Caribbean steel drums, Marsh and Phillips drove to Page’s house unannounced in June. He invited them in and produced ULPD bank statements showing large cash flows and spun a tale of a substantial sum of money from Dubai that had caught the Inland Revenue’s attention.
Marsh left thinking, ‘It’s not right but things do go wrong in business’. However, when the returns remained as elusive as Page, Marsh and Phillips made a second visit to his house. This time the man inside was in a very different mood and refused to let them in. Laura was crying at the front door and told them to come back later.
Phillips took Marsh to the barns site and then phoned Page at home. Laura answered and arranged to meet them at Lakeside shopping centre. She arrived with the children but without her husband. Laura gave Marsh a few hundred pounds in cash and left.
Weeks later Marsh paid a third visit to Page’s house. This time he came with fellow motor trader Alan Sweet. Phillips had hooked Sweet with an offer of a 30 per cent return in two months on a £25,000 investment. ‘I asked Phillips to give me some background in respect of Page and he told me he was a serving police officer employed on Royal Protection duty. He went on to say that Page set up [ULPD] three years prior and that most of his investors were police officers and solicitors. I was happy with this and agreed to invest … to purchase land or property in the Essex area,’ said Sweet.
Laura answered the door when he and Marsh came knocking. Gone were her tears and sympathy. This Laura was in no mood for another investor’s sob story.
‘He’s not here. He’s in hospital,’ she told them curtly.
Marsh was unimpressed and pushed the matter.
‘You should have made an appointment rather than turn up on my doorstep unannounced,’ she told him. ‘And you look like Freddie Mercury, now fuck off,’ she shouted at Sweet before slamming the door on them.
The two Bristol car dealers thought they would have better luck with McGregor, who lived nearby. The policeman joined them in their car around the corner from his house while they explained their concern that Page and Phillips had not been straight with them.
Marsh and McGregor have two rather different recollections of the conversation that followed. In his witness statement, Marsh suggested McGregor admitted it had all gone ‘horribly wrong’. Marsh said he then asked what had happened to the £10,000 put into McGregor’s bank account. The policeman, he said, denied any knowledge of the transaction.
According to the version McGregor gave to anti-corruption detectives from Operation Aserio, the £10,000 was withdrawn in cash and given to Page outside the bank. McGregor also said that, far from accepting the ULPD bubble had burst, he defended Page and told Marsh and Sweet that his friend would not defraud anyone.
McGregor had by this stage his own mounting problems with friends and family who he’d brought into Page’s scheme. This included a Bristol couple who’d invested money set aside for their wedding and house move. McGregor would end up paying back most of their £10,000 from his own pocket.51
Meanwhile, antique dealer Ian Butlin came up with a clever way to recoup some of the £30,000 he’d invested when he tired of Page’s excuses. ‘I decided to tell [him] I had a fictitious investor who wanted to invest. I believe because of this Page got Steve to give me £3000 cash as a partial return on my investment. I was trying anything to get money back. I tried this again later but Page didn’t give me any more money.’
Salesman Paul Bartlett tried the same ruse to recover the £10,000 he had withdrawn on his credit card to invest over two months for a 40 per cent return. The money was transferred to Anjam Khan’s account. Bartlett planned to use the anticipated profit to help set up his own business. But after months of waiting he became suspicious and set up a meeting in a Bristol pub with Page and a friend posing as a potential investor. Page offered the new blood the same deal. He then turned to Bartlett and asked him if he would open a CMC account. ‘Paul explained that it would be used to bet on the stock market and he would supply the funds. I declined the offer. He told me I would get my money back and that he had £1.8 million stashed away.’
Bartlett bore no malice towards Phillips for the loss of his money and the break-up of his marriage. He felt Page had used Phillips. However, publicans Anne Carter and David Williams, and some of those they introduced to the scheme, believed Phillips and Page had ‘deceived’ them and there was never an intention to repay their investment.
The balloon went up for the publicans when Jeff Pennell, an investor they had brought in, alerted them that ULPD had been dissolved on 30 May 2006. Pennell thought to check the Companies House register when he received no return on the £10,000 Phillips had persuaded him to invest in ULPD on 8 June. To his horror, he discovered that the property company was already bust, something Phillips also did not know.52
Companies House records showed that ULPD in fact was on the verge of being dissolved since June 2005 for failing to file proper accounts. Phillips, however, appears not to have done any of these checks when he started acting as an agent for Page and then an employee.
Bristol organized crime detective Mark Davey had made the same discovery about ULPD in the summer of 2006. He and his wife decided that they were not going to take Page to court to recover their £10,000 because they felt they couldn’t afford legal fees and renovate their new house at the same time.
Instead, Davey wrote to Page asking for return of his money or a meeting to resolve the matter amicably. ‘Over a period of months we have been promised through Steve that the money would be paid back in full with interest,’ he wrote. ‘This has not occurred and I have requested to meet you through Steve, who has been protective towards you and the difficulties that you have recently experienced … I would like to know, in writing, what has happened to our investment.’
Davey got no response from Page. The couple were aware they bore some resp
onsibility for their predicament. ‘In hindsight, my wife and I were naïve and foolish to make such an investment in the manner in which we did, without any written guarantees,’ the detective later explained in a witness statement. ‘Neither of us is inclined to take investment risks normally. We based our decisions largely on trust. It has put considerable strain on our marriage and our relationship with Steve and Nicky.’
By the late summer of 2006, relations between the Phillips and the Pages had completely broken down. Nicola was particularly worried about their future with so much discontent among Bristol investors. Her husband was more trusting of Page’s plans for expansion in Bristol and had set up a business bank account for a yet to be formed company he called Aristo Car Hire.
Nicola started to go off the Essex couple after an incident during a June visit to Bristol. The Pages were staying at the Jarvis Grange hotel nearby. Both families had gone out for a meal but the Page boys were playing up so they returned early to the hotel. Phillips and Page stayed in the bar while Nicola and Laura went to the room with the boys. The women sat on the sofa while the boys ran riot around them. Nicola took her chance to ask Laura about the business. Her husband not been paid his wages for a few months, the loan repayments had stopped and she was concerned about having to face family and friends who had invested with Page.
‘Laura, we are going to be OK? I mean about all the money that we have invested and that Steve has got for you?’
‘Yeah, yeah, everything is fine. Don’t worry,’ Laura replied.
The four boys were making it impossible to continue the sensitive conversation so Nicola joined her husband in the hotel lobby. As the couple headed for their car, Nicola turned to Page and said, ‘You’d better go and help Laura’.
By the time they got to their car, Page had rung and told the couple to come back. He was riled because Laura had told him that Nicola felt he was a bad influence on her husband. When the Phillips got to the hotel room, Page was in the middle of a furious row with his wife. ‘The room had been trashed, even the baby’s cot, and they were at each other’s throats,’ Nicola recalled. They left immediately.
Violent rows in front of the children were now a frequent part of family life. Laura was tired of taking the brunt of wives and others while her husband drank and deluded himself that he could gamble his way out of the situation rather than own up, which is privately what she had told him to do.
Days later Nicola called to say they were coming to London for their money. ‘If you come up here I’ll knock your fucking block off,’ Laura told her and slammed the phone down.
Shortly before resigning from ULPD and closing the CMC account, on 24 July Steve Phillips wrote to Page:
I have to advise you that things are getting totally out of hand here. Of the money collected from people in this area to invest with your firm (my wife included) not one has been repaid despite your promises.
These investors are people who can ill afford a loss and the lack of return of this money is seriously affecting their lives both marital and financial. I would ask that some return be made at the earliest possible time. I and my family are now experiencing personal threats and threats against our property.
Chapter 15
Death threats, guns and gangsters
Page parked his Range Rover in front of BAT’s offices in the quiet central London mews and waited for Fahim Baree and Anjam Khan to emerge. They had agreed to talk in private, away from more irate colleagues.
Baree was under heavy pressure to get back their money, which when combined with BAT boss Rahul Sharma’s company investment stood at over one million pounds. Not everyone at the travel firm knew the full facts behind Baree’s involvement with Page. Most knew he was his best mate, but not all were aware that while finance director of ULPD Baree had deposited investors’ money in a CMC spread-betting account for the Royal Protection officer that was now £38,000 in debt.
Baree had tried for as long as he could to do what Page had asked of him and ‘change the nappies’ of loose-bowelled BAT colleagues by assuring them that all was well at ULPD. But the continued lack of returns and herd panic that followed had ended the popular delusion about Page’s scheme and the time for wet wipes was well over when he arrived outside BAT’s offices in early April 2006.
It didn’t take long for the black Range Rover to be spotted by Dharmendhra Patel, one of the last BAT boys to invest. He rushed to confront the elusive Paul Page. When he got there another BAT investor, Matthew ‘Mash’ Smith, had joined in. Mash had invested £50,000, almost half of which Baree had put into his CMC account on Page’s instructions.53
The conversation by the Range Rover was getting heated by the time Patel arrived.
‘Where’s our money?’ demanded Khan, a £170,000 investor.
‘When the barns are completed and I get money from other investments I will pay people off,’ Page told the group.
‘You’ve been saying that for fuckin’ ages, what’s the score, Paul?’
‘The barns will be completed soon and sold by the end of May. Your money is safe.’
It was a very confident performance, thought Jit Mandalia, another BAT investor who had joined the discussion. It was also a pack of lies.
The barns were way off being completed and Mortgage Guarantee just weeks away from repossessing them. Page had promised the finance firm a £100,000 sign of good faith payment that would hardly make a dent in the almost one million pounds he owed them.
It wasn’t that Page didn’t have the money. Days earlier he’d secretly secured £133,000 from Baree’s mother who had re-mortgaged the family home in east London. But the story of how this money was secured and then squandered casts Page and Baree in a shameful light.
Akhtari Baree was coming up to retirement as a social worker. She wanted to buy a place in Dubai to live near her family or at least as a holiday home. As a widow with grown-up children, she had no desire to get older in east London after a lifetime of dealing with its problems. Her Leytonstone two-up, two-down was mortgage free after the death of her husband nine years earlier. It had also been rising in value, especially since London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics.
Baree had been trying since January to help his mother re-mortgage her home. When he told Page of his mother’s retirement plans, his best mate saw pound signs.
‘It’ll kick-start the barns project, which has ground to a halt. If I can get the barns to a finished state then mortgage them for £987,000, I can pay investors back,’ Page told Baree.
‘I’ll do it for you, Paul. But, you know, I’m going to need this back, it’s my mum’s house we are talking about.’
Baree didn’t tell his mum he was going to ask her for the re-mortgage money until after she had it in her account. The re-mortgage with Abbey National was arranged with help from brokers and ULPD investors Paresh Solanki and Bimal Lodhia, who by this stage had invested £130,000.
Baree wanted to get his BAT colleagues paid and off his back and redeem the £30,000 investment raised by re-mortgaging his own Leytonstone home in 2004. He still trusted Page not to have him over. But a simple check would have shown that by March 2006 there was little equity left in the barns to make the plan financially viable.
By Baree’s own account, he already believed that Page owned the property outright but had borrowed £250,000 to renovate it. A check would have revealed the barns had actually been bought with a massive loan from Mortgage Guarantee and that St James’s Palace officers had placed huge charges on the development, which would leave next to nothing for anyone else when satisfied.
Another suspicious aspect of this whole episode concerned the application form sent to Abbey National. It was wholly misleading, if not fraudulent. The building society was led to believe Mrs Baree lived at Paresh Solanki’s house, earned more money than she did and that the loan would be used for a retirement home.
She signed the form without apparently checking it because naturally she trusted her son to look after her
interests. He never took her to an independent mortgage adviser, who, if aware of the true facts, would in all likelihood not have advised that she gamble away her future on rescuing ULPD and the barns project.
So how did such a false mortgage application get made? Baree and Solanki admit that they filled out some of the detail. Solanki, however, says he did so without speaking to Mrs Baree and doesn’t know how his home address appeared on her application form. Solanki believed that Lodhia had filled it out. But Lodhia denied any fraudulent or misleading conduct in connection with the application form.
For his part, Baree admits that ‘the mortgage was taken out on the pretence of getting a holiday or retirement home for my mum’ but denied any deception or collusion with Page and others.54
Wherever the truth lies, on 27 March 2006 Abbey National did loan Mrs Baree £150,000. That day her son sat his mother down and asked for most of it.
‘I need it for a barns development project Paul and I am involved in. You will get it back with some interest in a few months,’ he told her. ‘Paul will take care of the loan repayments too.’
Mrs Baree still felt the bond of a surrogate mum towards Page and wanted to help. That day she transferred £140,000 to her son’s Barclays account. The following day Baree met Page and Laura at a solicitor’s office to notarize two letters, which all three had signed.
The first was an agreement that Page would pay Baree £544,000 by 30 May 2006. It said:
It is confirmed that Paul Page is fully responsible for the receipt and return of the below mentioned funds back to MF Baree. It is also confirmed that Laura Page has no lien or claim on said funds received through her bank account and that she was only acting on Mr Pages [sic] instructions to use her account as a vehicle for money movement.
For Queen and Currency: Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace Page 20
