The £544,000 represented the consolidated debt Page accepted that he owed to the BAT investors including Sharma. Baree said he agreed the strategy of consolidating the debt following ‘pressure’ from his boss. A separate agreement was drafted to cover his mum’s re-mortgage money, his own investment and unpaid returns. The figure Page agreed was £200,000, which he said would come from the money earned from selling Barn C to the Copleys.
Like the £544,000 guarantee, it was all pie in the sky, a cynical device by Page to get his hands on more cash and keep Laura protected from the shit storm that he knew was gathering on the horizon.
With the two worthless agreements in place, on 28 March 2006 Page directed Baree on how to disperse the money now in his account. £33,000 was transferred to Laura’s NatWest account. On the form Baree described the purpose as a ‘personal loan’.
The second transfer of £80,000 went to the Bristol HSBC account of Steve and Nicola Phillips. Again, Baree put ‘personal loan’ on the form and followed it up with an email. It was sent to Nicola but addressed ‘To whom it may concern’, reflecting the fact that Baree had no relationship with his fellow lieutenant.
‘I was aware of the name Steven [sic] Phillips as another person generating investments in relation to the barns project, though I never spoke to him. My £140,000 investment was solely for completion of the barns project and I told Paul this and that it wasn’t to be used to pay off people,’ said Baree.55
However, court documents show that Phillips, on instructions, had immediately transferred all the £80,000 to his wife’s CMC account for Page to gamble.
A day later, on 29 March, Baree withdrew a further £20,000 from his mother’s mortgage money and handed the cash to his best friend. Page rewarded him with the use of a VW Toureg courtesy of Gripper Cars. Baree also pimped his own ride with some of the money that his mum had put in his account for the barns project. Despite being heavily in debt, he spent £1500 on a set of alloy wheels.
Baree’s conduct around the re-mortgaging of his mum’s home and his gamble with her future raises serious questions about his credibility. Before the fraud trial he told me that he’d done the re-mortgage to bail out his best mate and get his own money back. ‘Even up to that point I still trusted him,’ he said. ‘There were warning signs around. I didn’t see it, I just fell into a big hole.’
But looking at what Baree must have known by March 2006, his claims of being a foolish, trusting dupe either show an appalling myopia or simply lack credibility. One major personal warning was the £38,000 debt incurred by Page in his friend’s name. Page had given Baree a worthless note in November 2005 taking responsibility for the debt. Yet, four months later, with the debt still unpaid, Baree was willing to accept another two letters from Page assuming financial responsibility for a loan almost ten times bigger.
Baree maintains that Page shafted him. And he undoubtedly did. But maybe Baree was also in so deep and under pressure from others that he made some very questionable decisions to recover the position; decisions that show him to have been either reckless or stupid or on the very edge of criminality.
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The convoy of cars came to a halt outside Page’s house in a manner that made neighbours in the cul-de-sac twitch their curtains. It was a May evening in 2006, one month after Page had lied outside BAT that money was coming from the imminent sale of the barns.
Among the group of five irate investors was Anjam Khan. He had recently met the Duke of Edinburgh at a Buckingham Palace reception where he was representing the travel company.
Laura was already by the open door as Khan, his brother Saeed, Baree, Matthew ‘Mash’ Smith and his brother-in-law approached. Page was crouching down in the living room while his sons peered out of the windows.
Baree could see Laura was very angry at the heavy-handed presence and knew she would do whatever to defend her boys.
‘Why don’t you all just fuck off,’ she shouted.
While the others demanded that Page come out, Baree called the one Royal Protection officer from Buckingham Palace who he knew could reach his best mate. Baree had met the officer the previous year and also arranged a £7000 holiday for him courtesy of Gripper Airways.
‘Mick? It’s Fahim Baree. Look, I’m outside Paul’s house with some investors from my work. To be honest there’s a bit of a ruck developing. Can you get down here and talk to Paul?’
Mick ‘the Don’ Hickman was also an investor. One police document, which Page confirms, estimated that the Don had put £100,000 into the scheme.
‘Mick’s on his way here,’ Baree told the others who began backing away from the house.
The Kenyan-born Khan brothers were particularly annoyed because Page had recently duped them into handing over a further £19,000.
Saeed Khan, 43, had handed over £10,000 on 12 April after Page explained falsely that he needed cash for an employee of Mortgage Guarantee to release part of the equity from the barns. Baree had also given Page £10,000 apparently for the same purpose. It was yet another extraordinary example of the lengths some in the BAT circle were willing to go to in order to get back their money.56 Anjam was not involved in paying a backhander or sweetener but had put in another £9000 in the hope the barns could be completed.
When Hickman arrived at the cul-de-sac he went straight to Baree. Page was having a screaming row inside the house with Laura and wouldn’t come outside.
‘I don’t want to be here, I’ve only come here to break it up,’ the Don said.
He then turned towards the other BAT boys.
‘You all piss off! And don’t come back. I’ll speak to Paul,’ he told them.
Baree endorsed the idea and told the others that Hickman could diffuse the situation, find out the truth and let them know the score. He was, after all, also a serving police officer.57
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‘Get Paul Page on the fucking phone!’ Rahul Sharma ordered Anjam Khan in the BAT office a month later. As he dialled the home number, Sharma warned Khan and Baree, who was sitting next to him, ‘If Paul doesn’t sign this fucking letter you two are sacked’.
Page had already told Baree that he would sign whatever nonsense his boss put in front of him. Another letter for Sharma was just words not worth the paper they were written on, he thought.
However, for the BAT boss the letter he drafted meant an awful lot more. Sharma had been getting it in the neck from his wife, who wanted confirmation from Page that the more than £100,000 debt would be repaid by 17 July. He was also panicking because it was already June and BAT’s auditors wanted to sign off the travel company’s annual accounts for the last tax year. But before doing so they required confirmation that the debt was recoverable. Sharma was concerned that the auditors would discover he had used company money in a private investment with a property company that had now been dissolved.
Khan handed his boss the ringing phone.
‘Hello?’ It was Laura who answered.
‘This is Rahul Sharma from BestatTravel. Is your husband there?’
‘No, sorry. He’s out.’
‘Listen, you fucking bitch! Tell Paul he’s to give my money back. Now!’ Sharma exploded.
‘Tell him yourself,’ Laura responded sarcastically but taken aback by the anger in the voice of a man she had never met.
‘I’m going to kill you and your children if I don’t get my fucking money.’
‘I’m taping this call by the way and…’
‘I don’t fucking care.’
Khan and Baree were shocked by what they were witnessing. Their boss was making what sounded like a death threat against a mother and her five young children.58 When the call finished moments later, Baree summoned the courage to admonish his boss. ‘Don’t ever make a call like that to the Pages again,’ he said sternly.
Days later, on Sharma’s instructions a letter was drafted which the BAT boss and Page signed on 6 June. It confirmed that ‘BAT has invested £160,000 into ULPD in September/October 2
005 for the [barns project which] is estimated to be completed by 10 July 2006’. The letter went on to record that BAT had received £70,000 leaving a balance owed of £90,000 to be repaid by 17 July.
Sharma was still unhappy with the text and on the same day had Page sign a new letter with different figures. This time, BAT’s total investment was said to be £260,000. Of that, £146,000 had been paid back leaving £104,000 [sic] to be repaid by 17 July.
Page said he signed the letters because he didn’t want Baree sacked from his senior sales consultant job of six years. He also understood that BAT needed proof that the company funds had been invested in property. In one NatWest bank document, Sharma had recorded the purpose of the transfer of £100,000 to Page as ‘cash for trading’. However, Sharma, supported by Baree, denied during the trial that there was any attempt to dupe BAT’s auditors and the accountancy firm never reported one in the company’s accounts.
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Page had a fascination with guns ever since his paternal grandfather bought him replicas as a boy. He would produce intricate drawings of the weapons, which his grandfather displayed in their Leytonstone house.
As a Royal Protection officer Page favoured a modern automatic sidearm, the Glock. Weapons would normally be left behind the gates of Buckingham Palace when officers clocked off. But Baree remembers ‘a variety of firearms’ Page would show off on visits to his house. ‘Paul would claim that some of the firearms were real and showed me them. They were apparently official police firearms. He also showed me replica firearms. Therefore I knew he had access to guns.’
Page’s record as a certified SO14 firearms holder was not a good one. It wasn’t that long ago that he had his Glock taken off him for allegedly threatening to shoot his brother-in-law. Since then, the stress in his life had increased significantly. Angry investors were regularly ringing up or coming to his house unannounced; Sharma had made a heat of-the-moment threat to kill his wife and children and there was talk that Khan was receiving threats from Essex gangsters.
But this wasn’t the reason Page had started surfing the Internet looking to buy an unlicensed weapon. He was convinced he needed a gun because Bimal Lodhia, the financial adviser and investor, had also reported threats and a mysterious robbery, possibly involving unsavoury Turkish and Russian investors.
Page planned to arm up and confront the foreigners with the help of a carload of trusted police officers but the mission was aborted, he said, because no one had their names.
Once again, threats of violence and suggestions of organized crime involvement with Page’s syndicate were hanging in the air.
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In July 2006, Adam McGregor turned up at Page’s house clasping his credit card statements. He was still under the illusion that Page had bought the barns outright. It was a popular illusion because most other investors hadn’t bothered to check. McGregor continued to put in money because he believed that when the barns were completed and sold the syndicate would clean up in the housing bubble.
‘I’ve given you money left, right and centre when you needed it, Paul, on the proviso that all would come good on the barns, and now I need this money,’ he told Page.
‘Everything will be alright. Don’t get upset, mate. The barns will be mortgaged and you’ll get your money.’
McGregor was also worried about the spread-betting side of the business.
‘There’s far too much money going into CMC, Paul. Why isn’t it going to the barns to get them ready to be mortgaged so I and my family can get some of our money back?’ he asked.
‘I’m hedging on different accounts.’
It was a reply McGregor didn’t really understand but nor did he think it was obvious nonsense. So he left empty handed unaware that more than £1 million had been gambled and lost.59
However, Page knew he was going to have to show some proof of funds soon for his lieutenant to remain a believer. If McGregor saw a pot of gold, he thought, word would spread quickly in the same way the illusion of incredible returns had since 2002.
Days later, on 15 July, Page met McGregor at a cashpoint by the local Tesco outside Chafford Hundred train station where commuters were already returning from their City jobs.
Page had called the meeting to prove the barns had finally been mortgaged and there was a huge lump of money released in his Abbey National account from which everyone would be paid out.
He put his card into the hole in the wall, punched in his pin and at 4.51 pm removed the receipt slip to show McGregor, who was waiting nearby. The receipt slip read:
AT TESCO CHAF HUN EXP
TRANSACTION REFERENCE: 009524
ACCOUNT 4138
BALANCE £878,004.15
YOU CAN WITHDRAW NIL
McGregor studied the receipt and in that moment said he felt ‘totally reassured’, as if the pressure of debt and shame had suddenly been lifted from his shoulders. The last line of the receipt was rendered invisible by the shining hope of the one above it.
Now convinced he had proof of a real pot of gold, on Page’s orders McGregor faxed the receipt to also hopeful Steve Phillips in Bristol and to Craig Gunn, the boss of Arrow Car Hire in Cardiff, who was owed £20,000. Just to make sure the word spread Page also personally faxed both of them.
Phillips was at the time fending off angry investors. On 17 July, two days after getting the faxed proof of funds, the Bristol agent texted the licensee of the Hauliers Arms. ‘I received a fax showing funds in account waiting to clear. Given Paul your details.’
Word of the pot of gold spread throughout the syndicate and on 20 July Page went to a Sainsbury’s cashpoint to get a new receipt slip showing the same balance of £878,004.15.
Five days later, he returned to the Tesco cashpoint for a third receipt to fax other key investors baying for proof of funds.
The whole exercise was another massive deception of investors to get more money and buy more time. Page had learned by coincidence that you could get an immediate bank receipt from a cashpoint showing a large balance without actually depositing a cheque or having any funds. All you have to do is type in an amount of money that you are pretending to deposit and the machine produces a receipt slip suggesting a healthy balance.
At the time of the hole-in-the-wall scam Page’s Abbey National account was £4.15 in credit.
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The scam was only ever going to buy Page a short reprieve. Not least because a week before he tried it out on McGregor, fellow police officer Mark Copley had received a letter from Mortgage Guarantee telling him the barns were being repossessed.
Page was wasting no time seeking an exit strategy. ‘We’re going to fuck off, love, put as much distance between us and the UK. It’s all gone wrong. I need to regroup,’ he told Laura knowing how she longed for a new start.
Page contacted Golden Sands Migration, a firm specializing in relocating Brits to New Zealand for £4000. He also rang the New Zealand police to register his interest in transferring from the Met. At the same time the Internet was trawled for information on false identities.
The idea of doing a runner had been tried a few weeks earlier but ended with a pathetic volte face at the white cliffs of Dover. Page had rented a villa for £2000 in the south of France from someone he met while they were filling up their flash cars at an M25 service station.
Laura loved the idea of Cannes and packed her entire wardrobe into three suitcases. The boys were taken out of school and stuffed into the Range Rover, which quietly rolled out of Chafford Hundred with the possibility of never returning. Page thought if he had a break away from the incessant whining of angry investors his winning ways on the markets and virtual casino tables would re-emerge. It was a classic gambler’s delusion.
The family stopped at TGI Friday’s at Lakeside, where the couple had their wedding reception almost ten years earlier. Then they drove to Dover to catch the ferry to France. It was fish ’n’ chips all round but there was no hotel with any vacancy that night to accommoda
te the family. Page began to waver about running away and headed back to Essex with the kids asleep in the back.
When they arrived home, Laura took her three suitcases upstairs but didn’t unpack for weeks. It was only when Page discussed New Zealand in July that she started to mellow.
The desire to ‘run for the hills’ was common among other Ponzi schemers of this era when it all came on top. Men such as US hedge-fund manager Sam Israel, whose $450 million dollar fraud collapsed in 2005 when investors lost confidence and asked for their money back. Israel had phoney auditors to ‘verify’ his made-up financial returns and then faked his own suicide to avoid a twenty-year prison sentence by parking his car on a bridge and writing on the roof ‘suicide is painless’ before going on the run.
Israel had sustained losses, which he thought he would recover in the next quarter. But the losses continued and with them came the lies to investors. ‘I thought, “I can make this back”. I wasn’t worried in the least. I was a good trader. I was a workaholic. Was it hard to lie in the beginning? No. Did it get harder? Yes. I lived with the beast every day,’ he told a reporter from prison after turning himself in.
Asked how investors can stop getting conned, Israel offered this advice: ‘Seek as much transparency as possible. If they do not understand exactly how a manager is making money, do not invest. If there is a secret process that cannot be explained, run.’
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‘Hello, is that Detective Gemma Bradford?’
‘Yes. Who’s this?’ asked the Avon and Somerset officer.
‘Hello, I’m Detective Sergeant Mark Beckett from the Metropolitan Police’s Department of Professional Standards.’
‘Hello.’
‘I understand you are dealing with a complaint about a PC Paul Page,’ said Beckett getting straight to the point.
‘Well, I’m looking at alleged deception offences involving Paul Page and a Steve Phillips.’
It was early November 2006 and DC Bradford was investigating a recent complaint of financial deception from the Bristol publicans and others.60 Beckett, an anti-corruption detective on Operation Aserio, had been tasked to tell her of the Met’s interest in the case.
For Queen and Currency: Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace Page 21