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

by Michael Gillard

  Adam gulped. ‘I feel really stupid. I put a lot of my own money into Paul’s scheme. I’ve lost a lot and can prove it. I’m maxed on my credit cards.’

  ‘What about the £25,000 Steve Phillips gave you for property development? That went into your bank account and then into the CMC account?’

  ‘I’m not disputing that’s the case. I introduced Steve to the scheme, but I don’t recall the details of that transaction right now,’ replied Adam.

  ‘Well, as a result of what you’ve said, I believe you might be involved in offences of deception and money laundering so I am arresting you.’

  The DPS officers seized McGregor’s computer and took him to a local police station for a formal interview that lasted almost three hours. In that time, he told the anti-corruption officers about the Currency Club years, how he recruited his family and friends into the scheme and other policemen, some over a round of golf, some at Balmoral.

  McGregor explained he had to sell his Essex house to pay off £100,000 debts to banks, credit cards and to those who he had recruited.

  ‘I’m gonna sit here now and say it once and once only, how stupid I feel about the whole scenario and how, you know, how it looks from the outside looking in, but you must appreciate that it wasn’t like that at the time, it was very viable, a perfectly good business opportunity.’

  McGregor denied any dishonesty. ‘If I’m deceiving people, what sort of scam artist gives people back money that they’ve got off them?’ he said.

  His defence to the allegations was in part one of idiocy, avarice and misplaced trust. Page had offered him a secured contract on his investments but McGregor said he declined because he trusted the guy. Even when Page turned up desperate for petrol money in 2006 it still didn’t register that the scheme was bankrupt and his money lost. And after it was clear the wheels had come off he said he didn’t put a charge on the barns or Page’s house because ‘there was a big queue’.

  Beckett tried to make him feel better. ‘At least you didn’t pay for him to have his clamp taken off!’

  ‘What’s that all about?’

  ‘Oh! Don’t,’ said Beckett, sounding like comedian Frankie Howerd, although he more resembled the comic actor David Jason.

  ‘See. I knew you’d laugh at some point,’ replied McGregor, realizing the tone of the interview had changed. ‘You must have had a good office lunch on that one!’

  For months, Beckett and Hunt had been trying without success to get McGregor to give information about Page. His arrest undoubtedly upped the stakes for McGregor but he gave no explanation for why he was now being so open with the DPS.

  He did, however, give some strange justification as to why he had kept money that was transferred into his account by those investing in the barns or transferred it to CMC.

  The DPS detectives told McGregor that the losses on his CMC account were in excess of £400,000. Bald eagle accepted that by trusting Page with his CMC password he was liable for any debts.

  But he argued that he regarded any money Page put into his account as payment of the investment money and the returns he was owed. As such, the cash McGregor transferred to CMC was ‘his money’ to gamble with or allow Page to gamble with if he wanted to.

  Bald eagle accepted that he knew some of the money coming from Page or elsewhere into his account was for the barns renovation and not spread betting. McGregor argued that he was justified in sending to CMC the £25,000 Phillips initially invested for property because he believed there was ‘a big pot’ of maybe £3 million in the barns as collateral to pay back the Bristol agent and others.

  When the DPS officers told him that the barns had been bought on a mortgage, McGregor said he felt sick. He thought it had been bought outright with investors’ money. McGregor did not just deny acting dishonestly, but denied receiving any commission for introducing investors whether in cash, cars or free labour to do up his bathroom and kitchen.

  Phillips, he said, was another introducer in the Bristol area who also had a CMC account. McGregor was now also willing to name other players from SO14 and the MoD Police. This included Mahaffy, Copley, Hickman and Pearce but he couldn’t remember the names of some sergeants in the palace who were also ULPD investors.

  McGregor also named Rahul Sharma but did not mention that he was on duty in a police car when he escorted the BAT boss’s money back to London. Nor did he find time to mention sitting on the Throne of England.

  The DPS discussed McGregor’s long interview and sent a report to prosecutors who decided he would not be charged. Detective Inspector Orchard recorded in a police book that the lawyers didn’t believe McGregor had actually operated the CMC account or was aware of the deception. Orchard also recorded that Operation Aserio, from then on, regarded McGregor as a ‘victim’. It was also decided he would face no police discipline.

  Going into 2008, all three of Page’s agents were now witnesses in the rogue-cop fraud case.

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  Anjam Khan approached Page with trepidation. He climbed the grass verge dragging heavily on his cigarette. It was a dark Saturday afternoon on 17 December 2007. Page was wearing a baseball cap and military-style jacket. He had grown a beard and looked unkempt.

  Khan could only guess what Page now knew. The disgraced policeman wanted to meet in the field by his old house in Chafford Hundred. But Khan was nervous about any isolated, open space without CCTV. What did Page know, he kept wondering. Was he going to get beaten up or have a bullet put in his head?

  Mubasher Hussain had set up the meeting. Khan agreed because of the renewed pressure from family, friends and others to get their money back. His father had just been diagnosed with cancer and Khan was finding it difficult to look many people in the eye anymore.

  The grass verge where Page was standing overlooked Sainsbury’s at Lakeside. Khan dragged nervously on his cigarette as he reached the top. The smell of alcohol on Page’s breath was immediately apparent as he let Page pat him down.

  ‘Are you recording me?’ Khan asked as he reached towards Page’s stomach. Page stepped back and lifted up his clothes to reveal a lean, bare, wireless midriff.

  ‘It’s Fahim’s fault I was away for six weeks in Pentonville. I’ve lost six weeks with my kids. You don’t know what it was like inside, but I got away with it. The jury believed me, and now the police can’t touch me. They fuck me about, I’ve got so much shit on them they won’t know what’s hit ’em.’

  Page kept ranting while Khan sparked up another cigarette. Page told him he was going to make £450,000 from the Mirror.

  Khan didn’t know what to believe. He could sense Page was getting angry again.

  ‘Have you made a statement like Fahim?’

  Khan at first denied it. Then he said: ‘I was forced to give a statement. You and Fahim put me in this situation. You dragged me into it.’

  In fact all three Khan brothers had become witnesses against Page in the fraud case. Khan had also recently made a witness statement supporting Baree over the threat to kill incident outside his mother’s house six months earlier. Page and his wife were now charged with this.

  ‘We can’t talk anymore,’ said Page, realizing that he could get into trouble for interfering with a witness.

  But Khan then appears to have suggested a way out. He offered to withdraw his evidence supporting Baree in the threats to kill case if Page paid him the money he was owed. Page made no reply and left. He immediately reported Khan’s offer to his lawyer who then contacted the DPS. Page also told Hussain that he had taped the meeting on the hill and gone to the police.

  The next day Khan rang Page.

  ‘What’s this Bash is saying about you going to the police?’

  ‘I’ve got you on tape,’ Page replied.

  ‘I don’t care about any tape, you can shove it up your fucking arse.’

  The call degenerated into a ferocious slanging match. When all the ‘cunts’ under the sun had been thrown at each other, the handsets went down. Khan then co
ntacted Beckett at the DPS. The officer simply gave him and Hussain a warning about any further contact with Page and left it at that.

  Despite the concern over the kidnap plot, and now the offer to undermine Page’s prosecution for money, Khan was still put forward as a reliable prosecution witness.75

  Chapter 19

  God save the Prince

  On 2 September 2008, Michael Orchard, the detective inspector in charge of Operation Aserio, received a thick envelope. It wasn’t stuffed with cash but it was from Page – his defence to nine charges of fraudulent trading, intimidation and threats to kill.

  Page and his wife had been charged in late January. In general financial terms, he was accused of trading (as ULPD) with intent to defraud creditors and then launder, with her, the proceeds of that fraud by transferring creditors’ money through bank accounts.

  The decision to jointly charge Laura outraged Page, especially when others, some of them police officers, also had allowed their bank account to be used for onward transfer to spread-betting accounts but were now prosecution witnesses against the couple.

  As for the threats to kill, the case was evidentially weak, especially against Laura, and suggested a lack of even-handedness by the DPS, when one considered what they apparently suspected of Anjam Khan. He was now a prosecution witness who still hadn’t been interviewed about the alleged kidnap plot against Page and his family.

  This side of the prosecution case looked decidedly like a tactic to heap pressure on Page to plead guilty and avoid a trial in return for his wife going free. But Page was doing nothing of the sort.

  The Met had sacked him on a fast-track discipline board for fraud days before he was charged with the criminal offences on 27 January. His lawyers complained this was done in contravention of police discipline rules and ‘in order that the ensuing publicity [of the fraud trial] would relate to an ex-policeman not a serving officer’.

  Anyone reading Page’s defence case statement, which landed on Orchard’s desk seven months later, would have known that bad publicity was something the Met and the Queen were no longer able to avoid. Page was not going quietly. He wanted blood on the carpets at Buckingham Palace and snot on the walls of the court. And as Orchard turned each page of lurid allegations, he knew it would personally be a dirty fight.

  But it was not just the Met’s anti-corruption squad that was in his line of fire. Page was also doing his best, and funniest, to undermine the carefully crafted image of SO14 as an elite unit. He mentioned the nicknames, allegations of drug dealing, trading in hard-core pornography and a general culture of drinking, sleeping on the job, gambling, piss-taking and fast buck-making among palace cops.

  The most sensational claims, however, were reserved for a high-profile member of the Royal Family.

  Orchard précised the defence statement and sent his report to senior managers at the Met and the Palace. A new Gold group had been convened to risk assess the potential fall-out. Of immediate concern were Page’s allegations about the Queen’s second eldest son, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.

  The defence statement said this of the royal:

  It was not just the Royalty Protection officers who abused their position, members of the Royal Household also frequently did. The biggest culprit was Prince Andrew. [He] would often have lady friends come to visit him, including frequent visits by Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the disgraced late Robert Maxwell. Very rarely would they have to sign in the ‘gate book’ when entering the Palace grounds, in direct contravention of accepted protocol. In addition royalty officers would be told on occasion to drive these ‘lady friends’ home when that was a clear dereliction of their duties. When on occasions [officers] challenged Prince Andrew and/or his guests [he] was verbally abusive. Any complaints made to the department were not properly dealt with.

  Prince Andrew was in his seventh year as the UK’s Special Representative for International Trade and Investment when Orchard’s précis landed on the desks of senior Scotland Yard officers.

  Never a darling of the British media, the Prince, dubbed ‘Air Miles Andy’, was already facing criticisms, which he denied, of cashing in on his trade ambassador role.

  Page’s allegations about the Prince’s personal life chimed with old tabloid stories about his eye for pretty women after separating from Sarah Ferguson in 1992 and divorcing her four years later. ‘Randy Andy’, ‘the Duke of Pork’ and ‘Andy’s Candy’ were just some of the headlines that followed him around the globe.

  The new allegations from a former Royal Protection officer carried more embarrassment for the Palace in that Prince Andrew’s alleged entertaining was at his mum’s house, behind her back and didn’t look good for a father of two young princesses, Beatrice, eighteen, and twenty-year-old Eugenie.

  ‘Bottom line, rules were breached to cater for his entertainment,’ Page told his legal team. He regaled them with allegations of girls from a club near Chelsea Harbour being taxied into the palace at night and personally escorted out by the Prince, or examples of Andrew’s alleged rudeness to SO14 officers, one of whom considered offering out the royal for a bit of Queensberry rules.

  On another occasion, this time when the Queen was away, it was claimed that the internal CCTV picked up a suspected intruder on her corridor. Page and others was sent to investigate because they couldn’t identify the person. He claimed it was Andrew in t-shirt and jeans who launched into a tirade of abuse along the lines of, ‘This is my fucking house. I can go where I want. Now fuck orf!’

  On 4 September, the Crown Prosecution Service wrote back to Page’s lawyer saying they regarded ‘a great deal of [the defence statement] as totally irrelevant’ and that shortly a judge would be asked to strike out huge parts of it.

  On hearing about this Page went ballistic. ‘Abuse of police resources was rife in all manners, including members of the royal family,’ he told his legal team. ‘That’s part of my case and the jury need to know it all.’

  Overlooked in all of his anger was the fact that the prosecution was not saying, and never did, that Page’s claims about palace culture were false, just that they were irrelevant to defending the charges he faced.

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  The second aspect of Page’s defence statement that was troubling for the Met Gold group was his attack on SO14. For the first time a former Royal Protection officer from Buckingham Palace was going to reveal the inner workings of what many in the public thought was an elite unit of fit, effective, highly trained and motivated officers protecting the Royal Family. Instead, Page was intent on describing his former colleagues as ‘a bunch of weirdoes’ that were ineffective against the new terrorist threat.

  ‘The Royal Protection department was in a world of its own,’ Page explained to his legal team. ‘This drunk got past one of my lot because he was on the phone, probably to me,’ he joked. ‘Prince Charles was outraged when he learned and wanted to have military protection to replace us. The internal investigation pulled the CCTV and those in charge were bollocked.’

  An example he gave of the ill-disciplined culture among SO14 officers was the use of nicknames, which gave the impression of a Sunday league football team of hung-over, middle-aged dads, not a Praetorian guard. Among the best ones Page offered up, complete with explanations, were:

  The Don – Federation representative and well respected.

  Monkey Boy – was built like a gorilla.

  Fagin – unhealthy interest in the Royal Family.

  Elvis – was a part-time Elvis impersonator.

  Doug the Slug – overweight and lazy.

  Eddie the hen – always moaning and spitting feathers.

  Barry Norman – as he watched films all day.

  Mr Angry – he had a short fuse.

  Elton John – looked like the singer.

  Two heads – had a split personality.

  MAPS – stood for ‘my armpits stink’.

  The defence document was designed to cause as much embarrassment to SO14 and make the
Met think twice about going for Page. It portrayed SO14 as a posting for lazy officers, those who wanted to be out of harm’s way, others who were frustrated with the legal system or who wanted ‘downtime’ to study for promotion or pursue outside business interests on duty. These were hardly the qualities necessary for tackling a determined suicide bomber.

  ‘[There was] an agreed understanding that what happened at Royalty stayed at Royalty,’ the document claimed. And what happened was sleeping on post, a ring-round system to wake up snoozers when the boss did an inspection, photos on the throne, arriving for duty whilst hung-over and handling weapons while still under the influence.

  One of the allegations Orchard highlighted in his memo to SO14 management concerned Princess Diana’s former personal protection officer. Page had alleged that he was ordered to pass Ken Wharfe, even though the inspector had been drinking.

  The defence statement said: ‘[Page] was tasked by a senior officer to undertake an officer safety test on [Wharfe]. [He] had missed his scheduled test so [Page] was told, unorthodoxly, to control this test in the underground car park of the department’s base. The defendant expressed his concerns to a senior officer but was ordered in no uncertain terms to pass the officer so he could continue with his protection duties.’

  At the time this is said to have happened, Wharfe was body-guarding the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Kent, at Jimmy’s. He was also secretly preparing a book about his years as Diana’s bodyguard, which was published days after retiring in the summer of 2002.

  Now a security consultant who regularly comments on policing and the Palace, Wharfe said he was unaware of his mention in the defence statement. Fitness training did sometimes take place in an underground car park, Wharfe confirmed, but uniformed officers from SO14 (1) like Page didn’t train personal protection officers from SO14 (2), he said.