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

by Michael Gillard

  She still liked goading him into proving his love and he liked to beat his chest for her. One incident they relished telling testifies to their crazy love.

  Laura adored her Range Rover. Page teased that she had ‘pimped her ride’ by adding chrome wing mirrors, a chrome footwell and a chrome strip down the side.

  One sunny afternoon on the way back from Wicked Wardrobe, Laura was talking on her phone as she drove round a Lakeside roundabout. One of the council workers on the island shouted at her: ‘Get off your phone, fucking cunt!’ Laura was incensed, stopped next to the island, wound down her window and asked him calmly: ‘Who you calling a cunt?’

  ‘Get off the phone!’ said the worker, standing his ground.

  ‘Fuck off Elvis! Laura replied having noticed his big black glasses and quiff. With that she drove home.

  Page sensed something was up when his wife walked in. ‘What’s the matter, love?’ He asked.

  ‘Someone called me a cunt.’

  ‘Where?’

  Page jumped into his car with red mist in his eyes. He scanned for the Elvis lookalike as he approached the roundabout. Easing his car into a lower gear, Page drove onto the island, through the flowerbeds and stopped.

  ‘Who called my wife a cunt?’ Page asked of the council workers. This was no time for solidarity and Elvis was soon pointed out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ murmured the King.

  Page persuaded him that his next best move was to get on the phone and apologize to his wife. He dialled the number and handed Elvis the phone. Apology delivered, Page reversed over the flowerbeds on his way home.

  £ £ £

  Wicked Wardrobe opened in August 2005. It was around the time that Page had gone to Royal Protection officer Richard Humby’s house to explain ‘his system’ for making money.

  ‘Because the property side is doing so well, Dick, I’m going to dedicate my time to the financial markets. Let me show you how it works,’ Page offered.

  Humby was intrigued and switched the TV over to Teletext. Page explained how he hedged his bets by going long and short in the financial markets.

  ‘Take oil and other commodities. I’ve got a broker and we have triggers in place to prevent losses.’

  This self-portrait of well-informed, measured gambling with a broker angel watching over his shoulder to ensure the sweet smell of success did not go to his head was as far from the truth as Page could get. He was, in fact, so desperate for money in the summer of 2005 that he’d even applied to return to SO14.32

  ‘[I needed] to get back into the markets and make some big money quick, which went wrong,’ he told me.

  ‘How wrong?’ I asked.

  Page explained that he had access to three or four online casinos in which he lost £100,000 of ULPD money. Some of it was learning a new roulette technique. ‘I was taking the piss,’ he said. And how.

  An analysis of his betting record just days after giving Humby the masterclass gives a frightening picture of what a sad, degenerate gambler on a massive losing streak Page had become.

  A sleepless Sunday morning on 14 August saw Page, frozen in front of his laptop screen, staring at a virtual pack of cards. It was 1.21 am and time for a game of Internet poker. Betting in multiple currencies, he lost $3000 in two hours. At 3.13 am Page emptied his account and bought chips worth $10,250. Further losing hands over the next thirty minutes left him $3500 down. But the award of a £10 bonus from the online poker company brought him back to the table for a final losing bet before he joined Laura in bed at 3.49 am.

  After a few hours’ sleep, Page was up for the Sunday afternoon premiership clash between Arsenal and Newcastle. Thierry Henry was making his first appearance as captain of the north London side. The bookies were offering 5–2 on Arsenal. Page bet the balance of his account, £5414. He won £2165 with ten minutes to spare before the Chelsea v Wigan kick-off. He bet the lot on the London team, and won again.

  Feeling his luck had changed, Page waited for the boys to go to sleep before returning at 11.21 pm to the online poker table with $1000 in chips. It hadn’t. He lost a few small hands and decided to buy more chips, this time in sterling. Further hands were lost but at least he was only a few hundred pounds down by 1.32 am. A £10 bonus kept him at the table and he decided to buy $16,600 worth of chips with the remaining balance of his account. He lost a few more hands before switching back to sterling chips. The currency may have changed but not his luck. He’d lost just under £1000.

  At 1.57 am, Page decided to bet on US basketball. He hedged bets on two games and lost £2801. Time to quit and go to bed.

  However, he hardly had time to digest his Monday morning breakfast before he was back at the poker table. By midday he’d lost $1000. By 3 pm he had lost the £3200. But a £1000 injection from his Solo debit card and Page was back betting, only this time on cricket. He backed England to beat Australia. They didn’t, leaving £7 in the pot.

  After a few hours off, at 8.03 pm Page transferred £2000 from his Solo card to his online betting account and treated himself to a long poker session. But by 2.40 am on Tuesday 16 August he was potless.

  Page’s gambling with other people’s money was not that much different from some investment bank traders and hedge-fund managers in the financial casinos of Wall Street and the City. The first round of losses is hidden on the justification that the positions will be recovered the following month. When they are not, the deceit gets bigger until eventually the losses are so great and the lie so embedded that there is no way back, only a gambler’s delusion that it could all be put right with the throw of the dice. ‘I’m in so deep, what have I got to lose,’ they tell themselves.

  The hope that the position can be quickly recovered is not illusionary, but rare. A 26-year-old Morgan Stanley commodities dealer returned well lubricated from a three-hour lunch and racked up a $10 million debt over ninety minutes, which he then hid. Luckily, he managed to recover the position the next day with his bosses none the wiser.

  More common in these times was the activities of a small group of traders at Swiss Bank UBS who, for several years and without authority, had gambled tens of millions of pounds of clients’ money on foreign currencies and precious metals, then hid the losses. The scam was not picked up internally or by the asleep-at-the-wheel watchdog.

  On 12 September 2005, Mortgage Guarantee wrote to the Pages warning of a ‘serious overspend on the [barns] project which together with the overrun on time is causing great concern’.

  The finance company had no idea how much worse Page’s grand design was about to get.

  Chapter 13

  Winter of discontent

  ‘I want you to follow the dough back into London,’ Page told Adam McGregor.

  It was Sunday 16 October 2005 and the two men were waiting for the representative of a major civilian investor in a retail car park in Beckton, a regenerated part of east London’s docklands.

  McGregor had recently transferred out of SO14 and was back on the beat at nearby Dagenham police station. Although no longer in Royalty Protection he was still a key lieutenant in the syndicate. In that role, Page had asked him to provide police protection for a large sum of money that was too big for one brown envelope. The cash was for Rahul Sharma, the co-owner of BestAtTravel (BAT).

  Anjam Khan, Sharma’s employee and agent in the transaction, was expected any minute. His boss was waiting in his central London office for the money. The police escort was Page’s idea to impress the multi-millionaire.

  McGregor was on duty in a marked police BMW with a colleague. Page had parked his leased Porsche convertible next to them. In a carrier bag on the front seat was £35,000.

  Khan, a small overweight 40-year-old with big tinted glasses that covered most of his face, arrived in a new BMW X5 jeep. He alighted to greet Page and then McGregor, whom he knew.

  ‘Here’s the dough for Rahul,’ Page said, handing over the thick package. ‘Adam is going to escort you as far as the Limehouse tunnel.’ Khan felt co
mfortable with the idea. McGregor had recently driven him to pick up his X5.

  The three men got into their cars. Page turned right onto the A13 back to Chafford Hundred. Khan and his police escort turned left towards London. Within minutes the police convoy was in the shadow of Canary Wharf. McGregor flashed his lights as he turned off at the entrance to the tunnel. Khan continued under the Thames emerging on the approach road to the Tower of London and central London.

  On his arrival at BAT in Whitfield Street, Khan handed Sharma the cash and watched his boss deposit it with great relief in the company safe.

  £ £ £

  The tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 started as a massive subsea earthquake in the Indian Ocean and ended up wiping out fishing villages and exclusive holiday resorts along the coast of Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand, killing over 200,000 people in its wake and destroying the livelihoods of many more.

  The natural disaster also had a financial effect on the UK travel industry. Companies such as BAT took a hit in cancellations, which caused a cash-flow shortfall that Sharma estimated was around £100,000. He and his wife Rita, the boss of the company, were in India over that Christmas, which was also affected by the tsunami.

  Rahul Sharma had quietly watched Anjam Khan and Page’s best friend, Fahim Baree, talk up ULPD to his staff and their friends. By October 2005, almost £500,000 had been invested and large cash returns delivered to the circle of British Asian investors and financial advisers linked to his two employees

  As the first anniversary of the tsunami approached, Sharma confided in Khan that the business was still suffering a cash-flow shortfall. He discussed investing in Page’s scheme and was attracted by the prospect of quick and high returns. Days after his forty-seventh birthday on 2 October, Sharma told Khan and Baree they were to be his agents in a large short-term investment he was going to make using company funds.

  Page had always wanted to bag the Sharmas as major investors in his syndicate. He believed that Rahul Sharma really didn’t care if he was getting returns from dog racing or property, as long as he got them.

  £50,000 was transferred on 7 October from BAT’s NatWest account to ULPD. Sharma was expecting a 20 per cent return in one month. But the financial director asked for no security, never visited the site, nor did he talk to Page before releasing the company funds.

  Sharma continued to think there was nothing funny when Khan delivered £11,000 in cash just twenty-four hours after his initial investment. The BAT director did what Page had hoped and five days later transferred another £110,000 from the company account.

  While Page was feeling good about bagging such a big mark, Sharma was having a major wobble. ‘I didn’t really know what we were getting [into],’ he explained later. However, he knew enough to know that he had gambled the company’s money without telling his wife.

  A distressed Sharma told Khan and Baree they had to get the money back. Page was annoyed at the news, but was willing to play the long game. He transferred £70,000 back to the BAT account and found £35,000 in cash. This was the money he arranged for McGregor to escort in a police car from Beckton to the Limehouse tunnel on 16 October.

  The long game worked. Three days later, Sharma changed his mind again and re-invested £100,000. On the bank transfer form he put ‘cash for trading’.

  A few weeks later, Page gave Khan another huge cash return for his boss, this time £25,000. With the risky investment going so well, Sharma now felt compelled to tell his wife about the golden goose that could help get them out of their financial problems.

  Unfortunately, Rita Sharma didn’t see it that way. She was furious with her husband. The more she learned about the unsecured investment, who Page was and the police escort he had provided, the more concerned and angry she became with Rahul. Had her husband done any due diligence before investing he would more than likely have discovered the CMC charge on Page’s house, the huge mortgage on the barns, the overspend on its development and poor quality of the conversion.

  In no uncertain terms, Rita told her husband to get all the money back. Rahul put it more diplomatically during Page’s trial when he said: ‘My wife and I were both under pressure, it was company money.’

  Rita was also annoyed at the involvement of Page with five of her employees. Most of them Khan and Baree had introduced. One, Jitendra Mandalia, thought investing in the barns was ‘money for nothing.’ He was offered a ridiculous return of £6000 in two weeks on a £10,000 investment. Although he felt it was all ‘too good to be true’, he nevertheless transferred the money to ULPD from the joint account he had with his wife.

  Dharamendra Patel was a different story. He felt encouraged to invest within days of learning on the office grapevine that his ‘clued on’ boss had put in a six-figure sum. Patel invested £30,000 by bank transfer to ULPD. He said he put ‘cash loan’ on the bank transfer form on Baree’s advice.

  Shit, they say, tends to roll downhill, and after the dressing down from his wife, Sharma made it very clear to Khan and Baree how important it was to him, and them, that Rita got her money back.

  Page realized the long game had failed, so he reverted to type and lied. He told Khan that his boss’s money was waiting for him at Wicked Wardrobe. When he went to pick it up on 14 November Laura wrote out a cheque for £104,000. Khan noticed that it was signed by Laura’s mum and drawn on her bank account not ULPD’s. Given the general unorthodox nature of how money moved around the syndicate, Khan made no issue of it and left for the office with the cheque.

  Days later, Sharma went ballistic when it bounced. ‘Get Page on the phone now,’ he ordered Khan, who dialled the number and passed his boss the phone. Page was not scared of Sharma and gave him a ready excuse with a promise that the cheque would be honoured if presented once more. As a sweetener, the next day, 18 November, he also gave Sharma £10,000 in cash.

  The cheque bounced on.

  £ £ £

  The BAT sales manager, Anjam Khan, was not just a bagman for his boss, Rahul Sharma. He was also a key investor in Page’s syndicate.

  Khan had initially resisted Baree’s attempt in 2003 to get him to invest with his cop family friend. He was Baree’s boss and earned £4000 per month plus commission from flight sales. All his money, he told Baree, was tied up developing his own Essex home with swimming pool.

  Baree mentioned ULPD again in 2005 and Khan met Page at a café in Lakeside to hear the sales pitch and review the ULPD brochure that Fahim had helped draft. He walked away from the meeting thinking the policeman was ‘convincing’, the money easy and that he would invest heavily. ‘I didn’t question it. I thought it was easy money. I didn’t give a toss,’ he said. Between April and October 2005, Khan put in £115,000 of his own money, £40,000 from his two brothers and another £45,000 from a friend.

  His first two short-term investments of £30,000 at 25 per cent were transferred to Baree’s account, who put it into the CMC account he had set up for Page. Khan said he was unaware of this.

  Given the proximity of the two Asians, it seems almost inconceivable that they did not know that spread betting and the barns were inextricably linked.

  Khan started to deal directly with Page and received £40,000 in returns by July, although a cheque for that amount had initially bounced. It didn’t stop him from investing £50,000 in August by transfer to ULPD, for which he was expecting a whopping 44 per cent return by the end of the month.

  The return didn’t appear, but Page renegotiated the terms promising Khan that if he rolled over the money until Christmas he would double it.

  In the meantime, Khan took a Dubai-based friend, Sanjay Luthra, to meet the Royal Protection officer at the barns. Luthra thought it all looked ‘very nice’ and agreed to invest £45,000 in September to help complete the conversion. The investment was short term, again with a promised huge return of £12,500.

  Three days after Luthra had invested, Khan invited his older brother over to meet Page and Baree. Saeed Khan was an estate agent doing well in
the housing bubble. Anjam talked up the barns investment and Baree guaranteed that if anything went wrong he, personally, would pay back Saeed from his own money.

  Saeed was still sceptical but his brother, Baree and another BAT investor followed up the meeting with a call pointing out they were all making money. Saeed felt pressured to invest but eventually transferred £20,000 to ULPD, almost half of which was raised as a loan on his Egg credit card. He never went to the barns.

  Khan’s other brother, Pervez, also invested £20,000 a few days later and brought in his wife’s uncle. Retiree John Ayling was worried about investing his pension money. In his witness statement he recalled how in October 2005 Pervez and Anjam Khan had asked by phone for £25,000 to buy some land and promised him £1500 back in six weeks when it was sold.

  Ayling claimed in the same statement that during the phone call he was also told that ‘police officers and judges had already invested’. Certainly the police had but not the judiciary. The next day, he transferred the money to ULPD. However, by the onset of winter 2005 the Khan brothers were getting increasingly anxious about their investments. Anjam felt Page’s syndicate may be going ‘belly up’. When he eventually managed to contact him to complain about the lack of returns, Page told a big lie. He claimed to have £600,000 credit in a CMC account, which the spread-betting company had frozen over a misunderstanding. In truth he owed CMC money.

  £ £ £

  Fahim Baree was the only investor on the inside at both BAT and ULPD. How much he shared with others is open to question. However, his own financial folly inescapably came home on 4 November 2005 when a letter from CMC arrived at Baree’s house saying his spread-betting account was now almost £38,000 in deficit.