For Queen and Currency: Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace
Page 35
Six years later, that remains the position. No prosecutions in the UK and most other countries of those responsible for the biggest fraud in history. Or put another way:
£3 million
lost by Paul Page
$3 trillion
lost by international bankers
£300 billion
taxpayers’ bank bailout
30 million
worldwide unemployed
1
prosecution of Page
0
prosecutions of UK and US bankers
In June 2014, one year before the general election, Tory Chancellor George Osborne announced that bankers caught rigging financial markets will go to prison under new changes to the law.
The announcement came two years after Barclays Bank was fined £290 million for interest-rate rigging to increase profits at the expense of those with mortgages, car loans and credit cards. You again.
The so-called Libor scandal unfolded very slowly after the 2008 crash because of the too cosy regulatory environment of the old chaps. More recently a similar banking fraud involving the fixing of foreign exchange rates – a Currency Club of bankers – has emerged and led to a £1 billion fine on UK banks by a regulator keen to show it had found its teeth.
All three scandals – subprime mortgages, Libor and ForEx – meet the Rivlin test. In other words, they are lengthy, blatant and massive frauds with dire consequences for the ordinary person. Yet not even the obscene bank bonus culture of incentivized high risk taking with other people’s money has been radically changed, and nothing as humiliating as a Leveson-style inquiry into banking is on the horizon.
Asked why no government has carried out a more systematic investigation after the financial crash, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University Business School, replied: ‘Because they would find the culprits.’
These are not just the ‘banksters’ who fixed the game and rolled the dice with other people’s money, but the politicians and regulators who encouraged, and then failed to control, the casino capitalism that gambled away the public’s future.
The public trusted the banks when they mis-sold them toxic investments as low-risk, high-yield opportunities. Why wouldn’t they? These were pukka financial institutions, not crooks operating from back-street offices. They also trusted politicians of all hues and the regulators when they too talked up what the banks were doing.
This is one reason for no prosecutions or public inquiry in the UK. Another is the mantra much loved of politicians here that such action against senior suits would stifle the risk-taking culture necessary for a successful capitalist economy, and make bankers flee the UK with their bulging pockets to less risk-averse shores. A third reason was encapsulated in the telling comments of Mervyn King, the former Governor of the Bank of England, as protestors from the Occupy movement blockaded the City with tents between October 2011 and June 2012 demanding economic justice. King said many like him in the financial sector wondered why it took the British people so long to demand their heads. In fact, it was just a small group of activists.
King’s replacement as governor, Mark Carney, more recently remarked that reckless bank bosses had ‘got away’ with compensation packages and retained their membership to the world’s ‘best golf courses’. Fining errant banks and bankers was not enough of a deterrent, he admitted.
So the suits stayed, and laugh as they stick two fingers up at the society they impoverished. Some publicly murmur there might be a need for restraint while secretly paying lobbyists to ensure politicians pass no new overly restrictive financial laws.
Ironically, while the politicians protected the bankers, their own greed and fraud was being exposed at the same time as Paul Page’s trial.
The MPs’ and Lords’ expenses scandal dominated the news agenda in 2009, with daily revelations of fraud at the taxpayer’s expense over second home allowances. The high degree of public revulsion at greedy politicians soon translated into prosecutions.
Scotland Yard was brought in to investigate the abuse that had largely been exposed by journalists despite the best efforts of the political establishment to cover it up.
In 2011, Page found himself at Her Majesty’s pleasure alongside disgraced Tory peers Lord Hanningfield of Essex and Lord Taylor of Warwick and the Labour MP Jim Devine.
My colleague Jonathan Calvert, the editor of the Sunday Times Insight team, has done more than most investigative journalists to expose politicians for hire and those who fiddled their expenses. It was an Insight investigation that first exposed Lord Taylor and also the Royal Protection scandal.
Page was released from prison in 2012. ‘The most difficult thing has been being away from my wife and kids. Nothing is worth that, not even if I had £9 million hidden away. Which I don’t,’ he told me.
The wannabe City trader had served half of his six-year sentence and is currently working as a driver with hopes to be a private bodyguard. If he wrote a book he said it would be called ‘How Not To Spread Bet’.
‘I regret what I did and I deserve what I got,’ Page told me just before publication of this book.
Laura remained intensely loyal and insanely jealous, even with her husband banged up. During one prison visit, a female warden told off Page for touching his wife’s knee under the table. ‘Inappropriate?’ Laura exploded. ‘We’re married with five children! Either you fancy me or me fucking husband. Which is it?’
The couple now have a sixth child, a girl at last.
Meanwhile, Lord Loughborough, the head of Royalty Protection since 2003, has retired from the Met after thirty-four years in public service. He was immediately appointed Master of the Household at Clarence House in charge of Prince Charles’s domestic arrangements.
Loughborough declined to be interviewed about Page and other security scandals. There was no internal inquiry into what happened under his watch. All the blame was hung on Page. As such, and despite what Judge Rivlin said, no SO14 officer was disciplined for any of the admissions that emerged during the trial. The DPS said they were ‘historic.’
However, six months after Loughborough’s departure, in October 2014 it was announced that his old department would be reformed to ‘tackle one or two pockets where [it] found a culture had built up in an unacceptable way over a period of time,’
The shake-up of SO14 followed a spate of new protection squad scandals, from selling royal secrets to the tabloids and fitting up a former minister who had called one of their number a ‘fucking pleb’, to claims that protection officers at Buckingham Palace had planted ammunition in the lockers of colleagues and stole items confiscated from visitors.
The Met is merging SO14 (1) and (2). The senior officer in charge of the reform explained that ‘rotation and churn stops pockets of culture building up in one place which then over a period of time can cause problems.’
There was no mention in all this reformist zeal about any lessons learned from the Paul Page scandal, where the fraud trial showed that a problematic culture inside SO14 had developed across the main London palaces.
Michael Orchard, the DPS officer in charge of the Page investigation, has since been promoted to a detective chief inspector. His next high-profile inquiry also caused embarrassment to the Queen. Orchard led the team that helped convict her official portrait artist, Rolf Harris, for child abuse.
The senior officer who in 2003 authorized the registration of ULPD as a business interest is now Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and a knight of the realm.
Sir Bernard Hogan Howe was appointed commissioner in September 2011 and knighted by the Queen the following year. The phone-hacking scandal had claimed his predecessor and, at the time of writing, Hogan Howe is dealing with several other scandals that I was involved in exposing. Among them, the Met’s cover-up of police corruption and the murders of Daniel Morgan and Stephen Lawrence.
Business as usual.
Photographs
21-year-old Essex Police cade
t Paul Page, 1992.
© Paul Page
The author’s 2009 exposé of the scandal in The Sunday Times.
© The Sunday Times
Paul and Laura Page at home in March 2015. “I often wonder why didn't the Met stop me earlier when it was painfully obvious I was ruining people's lives and out of control in so many other ways. People were nearly killed but the Met was more interested in protecting itself and the palace.”
© Paul Page
Note on sources
For Queen and Currency is a human story: the tragic rise and fall of a young couple in the boom and bust years. It is based on extensive interviews with the key players, witnesses and documentary evidence that emerged in the Page trials and official documents I have seen or obtained.
There is a lot of dialogue in this book. Some of it is based on the recollection of one or all of the participants in that conversation. Alternatively, they are based on transcripts of secretly recorded phone calls by one of the participants, contemporary documents such as witness statements, police logs, letters, official reports and the direct evidence on oath given by witnesses during the trials.
On occasion, I have carefully re-created the conversation or given someone’s state of mind. This is not invention for dramatic purposes but faithfully based on the primary sources cited above. Any conflict in recollections or positions has been harmonized to present an agreed essence and account of the conversation.
I was the only reporter to cover the entire fraud trial. I also extensively interviewed the Pages and members of their families. Only a few of the key investors were willing to talk to me. The opinions and actions of those who declined are represented in the book based on their witness statements and evidence at court.
Only one person, Anjam Khan, an investor who became a prosecution witness, offered to sell me his story and those of unidentified people he claimed to represent. The offer was rejected.
Metropolitan Police officers involved in the case also refused requests for interviews. Their views are based on the evidence they gave in court and internal police documents.
Notes
Chapter 1
Essex princess
1 Details of the couple’s early relationship are taken from interviews with Paul and Laura Page between 2008 and 2011. Unless otherwise stated, all details of their personal life come from the same source.
2 Page claimed in his 2008 defence-case statement (‘statement’) that he was given a heads-up during his application to join SO14. The Met and prosecution never denied it.
Chapter 3
Road to royalty
3 Elliot Philipp’s carer told me he was too old to be interviewed. Details of the Hills–Snowdon relationship and the inquest are taken from press coverage at the time.
Chapter 4
Gripper meets Purple One
4 Page detailed the lap-dance incident in his statement. The Palace and prosecution never denied it.
Chapter 5
Bubble bath
5 From Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841).
Chapter 6
The Currency Club
6 Evidence on 20 May 2009 of SO14 officer Phil Williams at Page’s fraud trial (‘the trial’).
7 McGregor’s discipline finding was set out in a disclosure note prepared by the prosecution for the trial.
8 McGregor declined to be interviewed. The account of his early relationship with Page is taken from his police interview on 7 December 2007; his witness statements (11.12.07, 21.1.08, 18.2.08) and his evidence at the trial on 20–21 April.
9 The account of Mahaffy’s early encounter with Page comes from the former’s witness statements (1.2.06, 11.1.07, 17.10.07, 28.3.08) and his evidence at the trial on 28–30 April.
Chapter 7
Throne games
10 Page revealed his account of the Throne Room incidents in his statement. McGregor admitted having his photo taken on the throne when he was cross-examined during the trial.
11 Allegations of a drinking culture at SO14 were detailed in Page’s statement. Peter Prentice, a senior SO14 officer, later corroborated some of these incidents at the trial.
12 McGregor’s involvement with the Hearts Club is based on his trial evidence.
13 The Hearts scandal narrative is based on emails and correspondence between civilian investors Jamie Ross and Terry Belton, and from Christine O’Brien’s complaint to CIB. I also interviewed investors from Watford. McGregor’s account comes from his witness statements and trial evidence. The prosecution was provided with a disclosure note from SO14, which confirmed the plot to harm Ross and his transfer to Windsor.
Chapter 8
ULPD: A firm within The Firm
14 Mahaffy’s witness statement and trial evidence.
15 Details of Lisa’s involvement in ULPD are taken from interviews with Paul and Laura Page, and from Lisa’s witness statement (18.12.07) and her trial evidence on 20 April.
16 The investment details in this section are taken from the witness statements and trial evidence of the McGregor brothers and Steve Tree.
Chapter 9
Jimmy’s
17 Mortgage Guarantee had reduced the conversion loan from £270,000 to £217,000. The money was mostly released between May and August 2004 for Paul Ballard and his men to start converting the three barns.
18 The Mahaffys’ investments and attitude to Page are taken from Jim Mahaffy’s witness statement and his trial evidence.
19 The Copleys’ investment and dealings with the Pages are taken from the witness statements of Mark (6.12.06) and Sufia (20.9.07) Copley and their trial evidence on 27 April and 19 May respectively.
20 This section is based on the witness statements of the Mudhars (6.2.08) and Suri (5.3.08) and their trial evidence on 27 and 30 April and 11 May respectively.
Chapter 10
Gripper Airways
21 Author’s interview with Baree, 30 July 2008.
22 Author’s interview with Baree and Khan, 30 July 2008. Details of the investments by the three British Asians are taken from their witness statements: Lodhia (26.6.07), Solanki (6.6.07) and Hussain (5.4.07, 17.1.08); and their trial evidence (2–3 June, 21 and 27 May respectively).
23 Mark Joyce declined to be interviewed.
24 Author’s interview with Baree, 30 July 2008.
25 Craig Gunn witness statements (28.3.07, 7.8.07, 27.3.08). McGregor’s witness statement and trial evidence.
Chapter 12
Grand designs
26 Dave Newman’s witness statement (1.11.07) and his trial evidence on 19–20 May. Witness statements and trial evidence of the McGregor brothers.
27 The account of the Humbys’ involvement is taken from the witness statements of Richard (15.1.07, 11.10.07) and Beatrice (11.10.07) Humby and their trial evidence on 5–7 May. Further details come from Richard Humby’s police interview (23.11.06).
28 The Mahaffys’ witness statements and trial evidence.
29 McCallion’s witness statement (8.3.07, 27.7.07) and his trial evidence on 1 May.
30 Duane Williams’s witness statement (23.3.07) and trial evidence on 7–8 May. Williams received some returns but lost half his investment.
31 Witness statements of Phil Williams and Linda Jolly (20.2.07, 30.1.08) and their trial evidence on 20 May.
32 Page wrote to SO14 management that his seventeen months of special leave was necessary ‘to concentrate fully on my domestic, family, educational and similar commitments’. He added that if allowed back to SO14 he would ‘repay at a premium’ and save the Royal Protection Squad money from not having to train another officer. No decision had been made by the time his leave period finished at the end of July, leaving Page neither in nor out of SO14.
Chapter 13
Winter of discontent
33 When he gave his witness statement to the DPS in November 2007, Newman was a police community support officer. He made no mention of the £20,000 delivery to Mu
dhar at St James’s Palace. Mudhar only gave the scantiest detail of it in his witness statement.
Chapter 14
The Bristol connection
34 Phillips paid his cousin in cash from Page. But after four months the loan repayments stopped. Paul Phillips said in his April 2007 witness statement: ‘The last two years of my life have been hell. I am struggling financially and have constant money worries which will take me a few years to bounce back from.’
35 In his 20 April 2007 witness statement, Steve Phillips said: ‘I never actually ever got any commission.’ However, he admitted receiving wages and fees for money passing through his bank account and the CMC account in his wife’s name. Nicola Phillips said in her witness statement of the same date that she believed her husband was on commission.
36 There was some truth in a connection between Premier League players and Page’s syndicate. Financial adviser and ULPD investor Parish Solanki had arranged substantial mortgages of between half and one million pounds for two British Premier League players. He also had a business relationship with an African player. When cross-examined, Solanki said he couldn’t recall the name of the African player. Phillips’s mother Sheila never got her money back.
37 The witness statements of Steve Phillips (20.4.07, 3.9.08) and Nicola Phillips (20.4.07). She closed the CMC account in September 2006 because she was ‘not happy’.