A gang of seven people have been sentenced for a multi-million mortgage fraud in which they secretly seized the ownership of several homes and remortgaged them.
Four of the ring were jailed and another three given suspended sentences after the £3.5m scam which involved taking out mortgages in Salford, Cheshire and Lincolnshire, on ten properties that they did not own.
Former property tycoon Marshall Joseph, 56, from Altrincham, and professional gambler Alick Kapikanya, 45, who owned a string of property firms, from Greater Manchester, masterminded the scheme which involved three others who posed as legitimate home owners, and a bent conveyancer.
Joseph, nicknamed Mr Fastcash because of his previous company, Fastcash Property, joined up with the flamboyant Kapikanya to “steal” luxury homes. It later emerged that Joseph had been made bankrupt in December 2008.
Kapikanya would initiate each scam by visiting the victims and pretending he was interested in buying their homes.
The pair arranged for property titles to be transferred from the real home owners – all elderly people, including widows and widowers – to themselves before they then secured a variety of loans against those properties.
Accompanied by Kapikanya, Peter Tanner, Irene Perciful and Myra Trigg went to solicitors’ offices throughout the UK, posing as the owners and saying they wanted to sign over their homes to Kapikanya and Joseph.
The trio provided false passports and utility bills as “proof” of their identities.
The properties were then signed over to Joseph who secured huge loans against them. Bruce Robertson, who banked £50,000 of the proceeds, was the conveyancing agent.
In one scam, a surveyor was hired to value an £850,000 home while the unwitting owner was on holiday.
None of the true owners of the properties knew that their titles had been stolen or that loans had been secured on their homes. They had to fight to reclaim legal ownership of their houses – while Kapikanya travelled around in chauffeur-driven limousines and gambled away thousands at casinos, including at the Ritz.
Joseph and Kapikanya directly received £3.5m and were attempting to raise another £3.3m when they were stopped.
In 2010 Greater Manchester Police’s Major Fraud Unit began a countrywide investigation after it came to light that Marshall had defaulted on repaying the loans that had been fraudulently obtained.
Detective Constable Craig Moylon, of the unit, said: “This was a meticulously planned series of frauds which involved different people playing different parts, all for a common purpose, with no regard for the devastation they were to have on many innocent parties.
“Kapikanya used the funds he raised to gamble heavily at many of the most exclusive casinos in the country while driving very expensive cars and staying in the finest hotels, sometimes for months at a time.
“The offenders carried out their actions with no regard for the lending organisations or the innocent home owners, who aside from the traumatic experience of fearing they had lost their homes or were potentially liable for loans of hundreds of thousands of pounds, were forced to instruct solicitors to have their homes put back in their name and the secured loans removed from their titles.”
Kapikanya was jailed for six years and Joseph for four years at Manchester Crown Court.
Robertson, 49, and Irene Perciful, 48, from Duxford, were jailed for 30 months and 12 months respectively, while Tanner, 54, from Pampisford, Cambridgeshire, Trigg, 57, from Manchester, and Campbell, 31, from Banstead, Surrey, were given suspended sentences.
What is the governing body for estate agents doing about this.
It's everything that is bad and it concerns the way any estate agent may operate if they should choose to currently.
There are clear alternatives, ways to ensure that these things never happen again …
The essence (and the detail) of the changes needed are available on our blog.
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Mr Hendry, if anyone is interested in your blog they can look it up please stop abusing PIE for your own commercial gain. If you continue I for one will leave this site for one of the reasons I lost interest in EAT; You, your incomprehensable rantings and inability to discuss anything intelligently even when given the opportunity to do so. You are a menace.
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Don't even think about it, ampersat! The second you do that the d*****ad wins – and we lose your valuable input.
Best beat him at his own game – let's face fact… he can't play it himself so every time he posts his reputation sinks deeper than before.
I'm just surprised at the depth he has so far sunk to without imploding.
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"The trio provided false passports and utility bills as “proof” of their identities."
Blows a hole through stupid pointless draconian money laundering regs. We're all diligently copying passports etc whilst being threatened by crippling fines from HMRC if we don't gather our useless bits of paper. One criminal with access to fake documents proves what a waste of time and money AML is. Guess what, bad people lie! We all waste our resources whilst the criminals know exactly how to beat the system.
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Quite right, I've often thought that professional criminals would have the best forged documents that you or I wouldn't think were fake.
Sentences were a bit light though.
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Especially in the context of the £169,000 fine recently handed out to an agent for not being exemplary in carrying out checks which are so easily got around.
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