When the returns never materialized she sent emails to the businessman from her palace address and called Ross on his pay-as-you-go mobile. He told her that he too was a victim, having invested £55,000 into the Kevlar scheme.
Eventually, Belton made contact claiming money was arriving from overseas in diplomatic bags. It didn’t. Checks by a policeman on her behalf apparently revealed that the Met had previously pulled out of a police equipment deal with Belton and the file had been shredded.
Like McGregor, the senior Royal Household official never reported the matter. Christine O’Brien, however, refused to stay quiet. She made a complaint against Ross but CIB, the Met’s anti-corruption squad, took no criminal or disciplinary action against him. Belton, however, was arrested and interviewed. But again, nothing came of it leaving O’Brien unhappy with the quality of CIB’s investigation.
Ross told me that Belton had ‘hoodwinked’ him but declined to answer detailed questions about his relationship with the businessman. Belton didn’t respond to any questions.13
£ £ £
The Hearts affair was a warning to senior management at SO14 of a problematic gambling culture among its officers. The involvement of businessman Terry Belton could clearly have compromised individual officers and palace security. The way the scandal was hushed up, at the expense of civilian investors, did nothing to discourage Page’s running of the Currency Club. Civilian investors were now coming into the scheme contrary to his original intention to keep the betting syndicate to a small group of twenty Royal Protection officers.
The problem was that officers wanted to bring in civilian friends, sweethearts and relatives to benefit from the Bank of Page’s incredible returns. Page said he trusted the judgement of his colleagues not to introduce any undesirable elements, but in truth he also needed the fresh cash.
The fall-out from Hearts was a missed opportunity to examine Page’s Currency Club. Had anyone from CIB or SO14 done so they would have discovered that Page was hiding a significant problem that his police and civilian investors deserved to know about before parting with more cash.
Page’s Halifax accounts showed that since 2001 he was sustaining considerable losses on his share account. That year alone he had lost £200,000. Similarly, an examination of his spread-betting accounts with IG Index also showed troubling losses in 2001.
In fact, just one month after opening the account, IG Index wrote informing Page that he was £2700 in arrears. He had lost £80,000 of Currency Club money in March. IG Index chased but Page ignored them while continuing to bet with accounts in other people’s names.
In early 2002, the spread-betting firm won an uncontested county court judgment against Page for £2700. The gambling firm also brought the matter to the attention of SO14. Page promised chief inspector Brian Patrick that he would pay the debt, but never did.
This was the second warning to Met bosses that Page may be a problem. The first was a suspicious activity report a bank had sent to CIB in 1999 about large sums of money going through Page’s account. Had the Met looked it would have discovered other hidden losses, which may have led CIB to question whether a growing Currency Club of Royal Protection officers and civilians was such a good idea.
Page’s secrecy about his gambling losses mirrored the behaviour of traders during the growing credit bubble. The biggest Wall Street and City traders thought nothing of taking huge gambles with other people’s money, hiding losses from their bosses and spending obscene amounts of money on fine dining before returning more than half cut to the office for some afternoon gambling.
Elsewhere, the collapse of Enron around this time also showed how routine such corporate dishonesty had become in the pursuit of profits. Executives of the US energy giant had been hiding huge losses and debts from shareholders through various complex accounting loopholes and tricks, all of which were magicked under the nose of auditors and financial watchdogs.
Chapter 8
ULPD: A firm within The Firm
Page unloaded his five mobile phones onto the kitchen table, washed his hands and enthusiastically started preparing the evening meal. He loved trying out recipes and new techniques learned from the many celebrity chefs who, along with home-improvement shows for the bubbling buy-to-let market, were dominating the winter 2002 TV schedules.
Presentation was important to Page. He finely chopped and arranged food on the plate as if he was competing in Masterchef not doing dinner for four young boys with less discerning palates. Laura was glad that her man fancied himself in the kitchen. But as soon as the dishes were done, she wanted a word.
Page had recently been placed on restricted duties following a complaint from Laura’s eldest sister, Christine, the one who sold her the hair salon, Clippers. The business went bust a little over a year ago and there was a dispute about money. Christine was taking legal steps to secure a charge against Laura’s house. The move caused a rift in the Keenan family and infuriated Page, who was accused of threatening to shoot Christine’s husband.
SO14 bosses took away his Glock 17 pistol for three months, ignoring protests from Page that he’d only threatened to beat up his brother-in-law. The incident was not long after Page and others at SO14 had been called in about the planned assault on Jamie Ross over the Hearts scandal.
But this wasn’t what was giving Laura a headache. It was the Currency Club. ‘We haven’t been on a holiday since Margarita,’ she protested. ‘You’re running around with all these mobile phones. I’m rushing back to hand out money. I can’t go anywhere Paul, I feel like I’m fucking trapped.’
Page nodded.
‘I’m fed up with people coming to the door late at night for their money and waking these up,’ she said pointing at the boys. ‘I don’t want the neighbours seeing this. I don’t want this life.’
Currency Club members weren’t the only people turning up at their home. There were also red letters from the county court summonsing the couple to hearings over unpaid loans, credit cards, utility bills and hire purchase agreements. ‘We were driving nice cars and not paying our bills,’ Page recalled. The strange thing was they could have paid on time, but as he left for work Page would tell his wife to wait for the red one.
The couple’s crazy attitude was a departure from their early days when Page told off Laura after a debt collector had come to the old house over an unpaid clothes catalogue bill. ‘I can’t have this love, I’m a police officer,’ he had warned, before clearing her debts. Now, in late 2002, a bad credit record was just not something the couple particularly cared about.
With so much free money being thrown at UK customers, debt and moving debt around was normal. As journalist Michael Lewis observed in his book Boomerang, it was a time when ‘a tsunami of cheap credit rolled across the planet’.
However, for the first time in their relationship, Laura was the one urging financial restraint when it came to the Currency Club. ‘They are coming to you not anyone else. Let’s stop it now and let someone else be responsible. Can’t we go back to having a normal life?’ she implored.
‘I can’t love, people are relying on me,’ her husband replied meekly. Page knew the Currency Club had grown too fast and too big. But he was deluded about his ability in the financial markets and inwardly delighted at being thought of as the Money God of Buckingham Palace. The losses he’d been hiding from his investors and wife were a blip, he reasoned.
‘Can’t you see what you’re turning into? Why has it got to be you?’ she demanded to know.
‘I can handle it,’ Page shot back as the discussion inevitably turned sour.
‘You’ve got delusions of grandeur. You think you are fucking Alan Sugar?’ said Laura before storming off.
‘I’ve got a plan to take the heat off, love.’
£ £ £
The Currency Club was already changing by late 2002. Page had recently told his investors that he would be paying their returns quarterly rather than monthly. SO14 investor Jim Mahaffy from St James’s Palac
e was unbothered by the change. Instead of getting £300 every month he was promised £1000 every quarter. Mahaffy could have asked for his £5000 stake back and called it a day. But he didn’t, because he was ‘making a profit’ and happy to leave the betting to Page.14
Unknown to investors, Page needed to go quarterly because he was losing, or not winning enough, and therefore couldn’t meet his monthly commitments. Whereas before, when the Club was limited to a handful of SO14 members, he could afford the monthly bill and cover any losses he made from his own stash. But when the Club grew and civilians came in, the monthly bill was around £50,000.
The ‘golden rule’ of the Currency Club, according to Page, was that members had to be paid returns on time. He knew the repercussions of lateness were enormous for something built on trust. Word would spread and soon they’d be a run on the Bank of Page, with people demanding their stake back under his crazy personal guarantee.
Quarterly returns were a way of ‘taking the heat off’ him. But Page knew that it was still unsustainable because he wasn’t winning enough from spread betting. Some trusted SO14 investors from BP would be good for covering return shortfalls by paying the cash into another investor’s bank account. But this was a temporary fix to a deeper problem. He still needed fresh investors to meet the new quarterly payments. However, this growth in investors would only create more financial liability down the line, unless his luck changed.
If ever there was a moment for Page to heed his wife’s kitchen advice and get out, this was it. Okay, some investors would have made money, others lost. They all knew it was spread betting. There was no criminal deception; the scheme just didn’t work out. Instead, Page gambled that his luck in the markets would change and ‘hatched a plan’ to cover him in the event that it didn’t.
The idea was for members to invest in a property syndicate that took advantage of the twin bubbles in credit and housing. This would be an asset base for Currency Club members that guaranteed their initial stakes against any losses he incurred from spread betting on financial markets.
I wanted to change people’s attitude to the greed, get the heat off myself, [of] keep having to perform, keep having to churn out the money monthly, quarterly, but it was day in day out, and to put a structure in place with the investors to come into the property side of things. I did a specimen brochure of sites. The choice is invest directly into one – become a syndicate.
So I opened this company. I’ve got no, how can I put it, no business sense, about accountancy or anything like that. I didn’t profess to be … I didn’t know about my responsibilities as a director and really didn’t care to be honest with you. It sounds stupid but that was how it was. My first priority was to use some of the money to get a piece of land and build a property. I thought if I could push some of the money into that, it would be a core asset that would be at that time a money maker and the stability against any fuck-ups in the market.
However, no matter how much it is true that Page wanted to put the Currency Club back on a successful footing and earn money for himself and everyone, this was the start of his fraud.
Only much later could he accept this: ‘I regret the day I ever expanded it further than just BP,’ he told me. ‘It was the biggest mistake of my life because greed took over everyone and I was very naive in thinking I could physically sustain as well as mentally sustain what had grown to be something uncontrollable.’ In other words, the fuck-up was him.
Greed had certainly blinded Currency Club members to financial logic. None saw the move from monthly to quarterly payments as a warning. At the very least it indicated a cash-flow problem. But any questions, such as they were, Page met with confidence. He felt comfortable hiding the losses as long as he provided the returns, which, although a struggle, he was still managing to do.
To his investors, the consistency sustained the illusion of success.
£ £ £
One cold late January morning in 2003, Laura opened her front door after a determined knock. Lisa, her twin, hurried in holding her young daughter and an official-looking letter.
Laura was expecting her sister because she looked after her niece while Lisa worked at Next, the retailers in nearby Lakeside. But today her twin seemed agitated. As they walked into the kitchen, Laura wondered to herself if it was anything to do with the £35,000 that Lisa had loaned the couple a few months back.
Her twin, who had dark hair in contrast to Laura’s bottle blonde, made no secret that she felt emotionally leaned on by their mum to make the loan. Seventy-year-old Marie Keenan was a hard-working, no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is matriarch. Last September, she had let herself into Lisa’s house and waited for her daughter to come home to tell her that Laura could lose her house because Page had taken a big hit on the stock market. Lisa was apprehensive about lending the couple money. But she was mindful that her mother had fallen out with Christine, their older sister, for going against Laura. Initially, Lisa stumped up £15,000. The money came from her half of the sale of the house she owned with her former husband. But days later Laura came back in tears asking for more. Page, she said, was in more financial trouble than their mum realized. Laura had asked Lisa not to let on. She agreed and loaned her twin a further £20,000.
No timescale was put on returning the money. But standing in the kitchen with Lisa that cold January morning, Laura was sure this was cause of her twin’s agitation. It wasn’t.
‘I’ll get him this time. Look what he’s done now,’ Lisa said jabbing her finger at a letter from the Inland Revenue and referring to her ex-husband. ‘He’s only gone and used my name and address for something.’
The letter was a reminder from the taxman that as the recently appointed company secretary to United Land & Property Developments Limited (ULPD) she had certain record-keeping obligations under the law.
The Pages read the letter and started to laugh. Page turned to Laura and said, ‘I thought you were going to tell her.’
‘No, I forgot.’
Lisa wasn’t getting the joke. ‘Tell me what?’ she asked her twin.
‘It’s not him. It’s us. It’s our company.’ Laura confessed
Page had convinced his wife over the Christmas holiday that ULPD was the way they could spend more time as a family. Now he had to finesse the situation with Lisa. He told her how he had set up ULPD on 2 January; was its sole director and on company records had listed his occupation as ‘police officer’. All true. Then he told a whopping lie. ‘I needed to put your name down as company secretary because as a married couple Laura’s not allowed to be one.’
Lisa was more worried about her benefits being affected. She was legitimately claiming working tax credit to help single mums back to work.
‘Don’t worry,’ Page assured her. ‘You’re just a silent partner.’ This was another lie. On paper at least, Lisa was a company secretary and shareholder in a new property company. Had the benefits agency and taxman compared notes, it could well have caused her problems; at the very least, the suspension of her tax credits while the mess was sorted out.
‘I just need you to sign a few forms to open a business bank account for my company and that’s it,’ Page told her. ‘You don’t have no more involvement.’
In March, Lisa went with Laura to open the ULPD NatWest account. She felt ‘emotionally blackmailed’ by her twin but accepted Page’s assurance that she wouldn’t have any liability for the firm’s debts. However, as joint signatory of the cheques, over the next few months Lisa was called on to withdraw cash if Page was too busy pretending to protect the Royal Family.
Laura eventually took over the ULPD NatWest account in a move that reflected her deepening involvement in Page’s affairs. She had also opened an online account with bookies William Hill. Page had his own but would use his wife’s for a new betting front – sporting events. Their passwords for these accounts that Page controlled were Gripper 20 and Vogues.
The transition at NatWest from Lisa to Laura was easy because she had alr
eady struck up a friendly, almost flirty relationship with the bank manager. If it had been the other way round, Laura would have forced her husband to change banks. But Page was willing to curb his jealousy because the bank manager, he said, was letting them ‘get away with murder’.
Financial documents show that over the next few years Page was able to receive or transfer large amounts of cash through his wife’s accounts. The manager was not being bunged to turn a blind eye, nor did he have any personal involvement with the Currency Club or ULPD. He was just very accommodating.
‘You’re going to get me sacked,’ he would say when Laura rang up wanting an immediate withdrawal of a large amount of cash, as much as £40,000. Later in the manager’s office, the cash between them in a bag on his desk, he would confide in her about his personal life. She listened politely, chatted about her kids then left the bank to hand her husband the cash.15
The bank manager didn’t know how lucky he was that Page thought he was on side. It didn’t take much to set him off and Laura still enjoyed watching it. Page was waiting for her at Lakeside shopping car park. He saw a man say something as she walked passed.
‘What did he say?’ he asked his wife as she got into the car.
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘What did he say?’ Page insisted.
Laura knew the consequence of telling her husband. ‘He said I was nice.’
Page started the car and chased the man until he had him sandwiched against a wall. He offered no resistance when Page grabbed him.
‘You fucking sex pest,’ Page shouted. And with a copper’s instinct, he repeated the false claim to get the gathering crowd on his side. ‘He’s a sex pest,’ he told them.
The penny dropped. The crowd dispersed. Page and his flushed wife drove off.
£ £ £
United Land & Property Developments Limited had no office, no staff, no accounts and no authority to invest other people’s money. It was a virtual company that Page had set up for £500 with an accommodation address in London’s Canary Wharf, the citadel of the UK financial services industry.
For Queen and Currency: Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace Page 8