When asked by Cooper, Mudhar couldn’t remember the reasons he gave his two banks for borrowing money to invest with Page.
‘I told them I wanted the money. I can’t remember, I may have said properties. I may have said something else.’
‘Did you tell the truth?’ Cooper asked.
‘I can’t remember.’
‘The money from Halifax was given to Baree. Did you lie to them as well?’
‘I do not know.’
Cooper then confronted Mudhar about allowing a stranger to deliver him cash at St James’s Palace when Cherie Blair and Prince Harry were at a function.
‘Is delivering £20,000 in cash official business of the police?’
‘It’s not to do with the police. It’s someone I was expecting … he was parked up … he goes in through the gate, he couldn’t go too far.’
In general terms, the Jimmy’s officers that followed also told the same story and gave the same defence for why they had failed to carry out simple checks before investing in property. They all ‘trusted’ Page, who was a ‘good salesman’.
One difficulty was the unrealistically high returns Page was offering. In Mudhar’s case, an implausible 90 per cent. But several officers suggested the UK housing bubble made it all seem feasible.
James Mahaffy, for example, who kept his cash returns in a tin at home, accepted that 40 per cent and 80 per cent returns on his money was ‘fantastic’ but not unrealistic enough to wonder whether it was too good to be true.
Jason Molen, by now a firearms officer with the Civil Nuclear Authority, took a holiday to Israel as a commission for introducing other SO14 officers to the great property scheme. He told the jury he was getting at most 7 per cent interest on his building society savings, so the offer of a 50 per cent annual return was too good to miss. He said property was ‘very buoyant’ at the time he invested and he believed Page that there was no risk.
Police witness Duane Williams told the jury, ‘The investments made sense to me at that time when house prices were going up and people were making money on property’. The returns were not unbelievable, he said, because in 2005 the TV schedules were full of programmes like Under the Hammer, Location, Location, Location and Moving Abroad, and the media was pushing up house prices. ‘Everyone was saying invest in your property and it will go up, a £10,000 investment and your house will rise in value by £30,000.’
Amusing as it was from the press bench to imagine TV presenters Sarah Beeny, Phil Spencer, Kirsty Allsopp and Kevin McCloud in the dock holding Page’s hand, these defences by Royal Protection officer witnesses properly illustrated the popular delusion and madness of crowds that had befallen the wider British public.
The courtroom received a welcome boost when the Humbys gave evidence; especially the airing of the secret tape-recording of Constable Richard Humby’s conversation with Page in April 2006. Humby had already told the jury that he knew nothing about spread betting and believed he was investing in property and shares. Apparently there was no reason to doubt Page’s integrity because he was a gun-carrying police officer who protected the Royal Family. However, Humby told the jury that although careful with money, he took off his hat to Page for conning him with his ‘silky tongued’ personality.
As someone who dabbled in the buy-to-let market, Humby believed Page’s promised returns from property investments were achievable and not too good to be true. ‘But now we are in a mid-recession,’ he reminded the jury, ‘when capitalism and profit are dirty words.’
Undoubtedly, the secret recording the jury was about to hear was bad for Page. But Humby was worried how he too would come across. It showed him trying to cut a private deal to get his money back and then there were passages like this:
If you give me 10 per cent I’m not going to slag you off or think you’re a cunt, because that’s 6 per cent more than I’d get in the bank. I mean you’ve put a few grey hairs on my head, Paul! [Laughs] You know my marriage is fucking sort of on the rocks, well that’s an exaggeration, but things have been a little difficult. You know it’s not good when your wife thinks you’re a cunt. So I’m asking, Paul, for complete and utter clarity with me.
Humby explained to the jury that he was playing a part to get back the £135,000 he and his wife had invested. Page had already alleged in a briefing to his legal team that the reason Humby’s wife thought he was ‘a cunt’ was because he had invested some of her divorce money behind her back in the spread-betting side of the syndicate. Humby denied this in cross-examination and so did his wife.
Beatrice Humby walked into court in a black trouser suit looking like Jackie Onassis. Tanned with back-combed big black hair, glasses and green nail polish, she explained in well-spoken tones her distress and anger at Page’s fraud. She said her husband, who was watching her evidence from the public gallery, had kept her informed all the way.
Richard Humby had earlier told the DPS that when they turned up unannounced and spoke to Laura, his wife’s tears were put on to evoke sympathy and get some of their money back. However, Beatrice told the jury her tears were genuine and started to give the most intimate description of her state of ill health at the time of the encounter with Laura.
‘I’m telling you it was not put on. I lost a stone in weight, I wasn’t sleeping at night, I had developed haemorrhoids and was bleeding on the toilet,’ she told the court as her husband buried his head in his hands. ‘I suffered an awful lot. Do not add insult to my injury.’
Most of the SO14 witnesses denied Page’s claims about widespread abuse of palace privileges, gate-crashing royal garden parties and a drinking culture in royalty protection. But a picture had emerged of widespread and reckless gambling on duty fuelled by a credit and housing bubble and a merry-go-round of brown envelopes.
Under cross-examination, Lenny Thiel, the man Page had used like a personal cashpoint, admitted there was a regular system of ‘brown envelopes at the palace’. It made him ‘uncomfortable’ but he would meet Page in the car park and take his envelope of cash because he [Thiel] dealt with a lot of Asian people who insisted on it.82
Cooper memorably described the so-called elite Royal Protection Squad as ‘more Hotpoint than West Point’. The revelations of an Arthur Daley culture at SO14 coincided with a timely front-page splash in the News of the World.
The tabloid revealed how two undercover reporters posing as Middle Eastern businessman had paid £1000 to a royal chauffeur at Buckingham Palace for access to the Queen’s fleet of cars. Without security passes, the reporters walked through the Royal Mews entrance of BP past the SO14 guard to the garage where they were left alone with enough time to plant a bomb.
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Three weeks into the trial and Page had had enough of the drip, drip disclosure from the DPS files of documents that he believed were important to his defence. A prosecution source explained that the Met was ‘blocking’ disclosure of certain documents about the first DPS investigation in 2004–5 and the intelligence behind the Osman warning.
On 5 May, Cooper was forced to tell the judge that his client had stopping engaging with his legal team until the disclosure issue was sorted out. Rivlin thought it was ‘an unthinkable situation’ that the trial could be derailed because Page was threatening to sack his legal team. Cooper said his client urgently needed to see a doctor because he was clearly under stress and may need medication.
In fact, Page was ‘playing the stress card’ to get the trial postponed until all police documents had been disclosed. If Rivlin didn’t play ball and order the disclosure, he was prepared to run around the court with his pants on his head, he told me. And if necessary, he would sack his legal team and represent himself.
Page was gambling that Rivlin would then grant an adjournment for him to prepare his case and receive the necessary disclosed documents.
It’s all about time and money, the trial process. And I’m going to say to the judge, ‘Give me my disclosure, don’t discriminate and I’ll be a good boy. If you don�
�t I’ll be a right cunt and cost you a lot of money.’ My disclosure is a big part of my defence and if I’m to blame they are fucking to blame as well and the establishment shouldn’t be allowed to cover it up … I’ve got my game plan and I’m going to stick to it. I don’t give a fuck what anyone says and I’m going to fuck with the system. Like I’ve always said if they want to bring me to court give me the evidence now and then we’ve got a fair trial. If they don’t want to play by the rules then I won’t. Because I know how to play the mental card and I know how to play the fucking represent myself card.
At the doctor’s that afternoon, Page was asked whether he felt depressed or suicidal.
‘On the contrary,’ he replied. ‘There are people I want to kill. Do you want me to give you their names?’
‘Let’s leave it there,’ the doctor said nervously. Sensing he had been taken seriously, Page revealed he was joking but left with a prescription for anti-depressants.
An additional tension in his life was the return of Laura’s insane jealousy during the trial. She too felt murderous intent on seeing her husband spending time in the court consultation room with an attractive young solicitor. It caused a major rift between the legal teams when Laura made Page agree never again to be in the same room with the leggy lawyer and swear he fancied no one in court. Cooper told the couple this was unworkable because, for insurance reasons, he needed the solicitor present to take notes when he discussed the case with his client. He wanted their wishes in writing and told Page that if he was found guilty it would be his wife’s fault.
‘If I’m found guilty because I don’t want any more grief off my wife then so be it!’ Page joked. But he was livid with Laura for making him out to be a sex pest when it was her jealousy.
Just as Page was preparing to play the stress card and sack his legal team, he received news that his seventy-three-year-old mother was dying. Page was allowed to leave the court to be at her side in hospital. The next day, he sacked Cooper and the others. Page told me he was annoyed that his barrister wouldn’t put certain matters to police witnesses, such as any involvement in freemasonry and the Prince Andrew allegations. ‘At least if I end up in a cell I’ll know I gave it my best shot.’ Page also joked that he wanted a chance to make ‘one last sales pitch’ to the jury by the end of which they would be buying shares in ULPD.
Cooper couldn’t stress enough how important it was that the next crucial witnesses, the BAT boys and Baree, were professionally cross-examined. But Page was unmoved. He was about to tell Rivlin that he was too mentally unwell to start representing himself straight away when his mother died midweek on 13 May.
The judge granted an adjournment but only until after the funeral on Monday and let Page know that if he still insisted on representing himself he would not be allowed to ask questions outside the rules of the court.
The weekend before Jean Page’s funeral was also Harry’s fifth birthday. He was too young to understand the pain his father was going through. ‘Will Nan bring me back a present from heaven?’ Harry asked his mum.
Page was spending long spells locked in his bedroom. Laura did all she could to comfort him but Page had just learned a very difficult truth about his mother, which made him reassess his childhood.
The Leytonstone boy had grown up thinking his paternal grandparents had brought him up because his parents weren’t financially stable enough to give him a good start. The truth, his Aunty Pat told him, was a lot different.
The 27-year-old Terry Page married Jean in 1971, two months after their son was born. But it soon became apparent that Terry couldn’t cope with his wife’s past. It drove him to drink and violence. Not against her. He loved Jean greatly, who was ten years older and from a traditional Irish family. What Terry Page couldn’t handle was that his wife had been abused and made pregnant by a relative.
When they married, Jean had a nine-year-old daughter who the family passed off as her sister. Like much abuse in these times, it was unspoken and swept under the carpet, but not by Terry Page. Jealousy and rage consumed him to the point he would regularly attack the alleged abuser, he told me. Every time he was before a judge, Terry would apologize and promise to behave. The courts were sympathetic, he said, but told him they would have to start sending him to prison if there was a next time, which of course there was. Terry was jailed several times and had a long battle with alcohol. ‘I never knew what she saw in me,’ he said.
At the crematorium on 18 May, Laura and Terry sat on either side of Page with reassuring hands on his back. The priest recalled how Jean would giggle at funerals and had said shortly before her death that her grandchildren brought her joy and laughter.
Page said his final goodbye to his mother as her favourite song, ‘Killing Me Softly’, filled the chapel.
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The trial restarted the following day. Judge Rivlin had no intention of falling into Page’s trap. He took the unusual step of making senior officers from Operation Aserio swear under oath that they were not deliberately withholding material that would damage their case or paint them in an embarrassing light.
The jury were not aware of the battle over disclosure. Public confidence in the Met was already nose-diving over its cover-up following the very recent death of an innocent man during the G20 summit. Newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson collapsed and died minutes after a riot officer pushed and hit him on his way home to his hostel for down-and-outs.
Tomlinson had become caught up in an anti-capitalism demonstration in the City over the failure to prosecute banks and bankers for the global Ponzi-type scam they had operated. There was further outrage that the banking industry was sticking two fingers up at its victims by continuing an obscene bonus culture in the middle of a worldwide recession where millions were now unemployed and homeless.
The Met claimed Tomlinson had died of other causes until phone-video footage emerged of the riot officer assaulting him moments before he collapsed at the Royal Exchange.
There was a strong smell of Met cover-up at the Page trial too. One set of withheld documents concerned the November 2006 intelligence behind the Osman warning. The documents were only disclosed to Page’s legal team shortly before the cross-examination of Anjam Khan.
It appears that the prosecution barristers had won an important dispute with the DPS that Page should know it was Khan who they suspected of being behind the kidnap threat to him and his family. Until then Page was convinced it was investor cops from St James’s Palace.
Judge Rivlin agreed with the prosecution barristers that the Osman intelligence file, that the Met was so keen to protect from public scrutiny, should be disclosed. The file contained not just the intelligence about Khan but a set of the damaging police minutes of the November 2006 Gold meetings in the days running up to and immediately after the Sun incident.
The prosecution barristers were aware that disclosure of all this sensitive material had the potential to damage the DPS and Khan, their witness who had never been formally interviewed about the Osman intelligence.
The problem was this: did the decision not to interview Khan mean that the DPS hadn’t taken the intelligence seriously? And if they hadn’t taken it seriously then why was the intelligence used to justify such a serious step as giving Page and his family an Osman warning?
Over two years had passed since November 2006 when the DPS first received the intelligence about Khan. The prosecution barristers could see that unless he was interviewed before taking the witness stand it would look like the Osman warning had been an extraordinary pretext to get rid of Page, but one that ended up causing serious consequences for public safety, as the incident with the Sun photographer showed. It could also be made to look like the DPS had been dry cleaning their witness to help build a rogue-cop case against Page.
So just two weeks before the trial started, on 31 March a junior DPS detective was sent to interview Khan under caution. The travel agent made a witness statement denying any involvement in the kidnap plot.
It remains unexplained why none of the Osman intelligence file had been disclosed during Page’s earlier trial for the assault on the Sun photographer in 2007.
Back at the fraud trial, Page had been persuaded to reinstate his legal team for the next round of BAT witnesses. Cooper was relishing the chance to cross-examine Khan. The barrister took the BAT sales manager through the night he and Page were driving when Laura called with news that DPS officers had delivered an Osman warning. Khan dramatically described how Page was threatening to beat up whoever was behind the threats. He said he too would have been concerned upon receiving such a warning.
Cooper took the opportunity to ask Khan whether he ever thought of telling the man sitting next to him, ‘Actually it’s me who is threatening your family’.
‘That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard,’ Khan retorted.
‘You’ve told the jury lie upon lie upon lie since you got in the witness box,’ Cooper said.
Earlier, Khan had confirmed McGregor’s police escort but he denied telling Page that his boss was looking for quick money from spread betting after BAT took a financial hit following the 2004 tsunami. He said Sharma had invested to help his employees recover their money.
Of his own £115,000 investment, Khan said it was purely for property and expressed surprise that Fahim Baree had transferred some of his initial stake to a spread-betting account. However, he admitted transferring other investors’ money to the bank accounts of strangers.
Khan, of course, was also a witness against Page in the threat to kill Baree allegation. Cooper took him through their dramatic meeting on the grassy verge in November 2007 and the offer to withdraw his witness statement in return for his money back. Khan denied that the offer constituted an attempt to ‘blackmail’ Page.
The cross-examination left the BAT witness looking exposed. His estate-agent brother also didn’t fair too well in Cooper’s hands. Saeed Khan strongly denied he was one of those involved in the plot to harm Page and his family. However, he admitted putting up £10,000 for Page to bribe an employee of Mortgage Guarantee to release funds from the barns. Saaed Khan described the money as a ‘drink’ or ‘backhander.’
For Queen and Currency: Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace Page 32
