The Steeple Times

Tag: convicted

  • Taxes are only for the little people

    Taxes are only for the little people

    HMRC publish a list of tax evaders but neglect to mention any large corporations

     

    The hotelier and real estate heiress Leona Helmsley stated: “Taxes are only for the little people” before being convicted of income tax evasion in 1989.

     

    Leona Helmsley (1920 - 2007)
    Leona Helmsley (1920 – 2007)
    HMRC's list of deliberate tax defaulters published on 21st February 2013
    HMRC’s list of deliberate tax defaulters published on 21st February 2013

     

    Yesterday, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs published a list of names and addresses of nine individuals and companies who they describe as tax defaulters. Amongst the names on the list are a grocer, a hairdresser and a coach operator and the amounts owed range from £29,111 to £447,904.

     

    In response, Richard Murphy of Tax Research called the list of names: “Plain, straightforward hypocrisy”. He went on to state:

     

    “The people named are easy targets. There are clearly different categories of tax crime, with small businesses who put cash in HMRC’s pockets named and shamed; but banks, wealthy lawyers and global corporations offered anonymity. It seems that only little people pay tax and only little people are named and shamed”.

     

    Mr Murphy is quite right. Whilst these people may owe the taxman money, their activities are not in the league of the tax avoidance strategies of Starbucks, Google and Amazon.

     

    If HMRC don’t want to be placed in the same category as Leona Helmsley, they’d do well to change their ways. Instead they’d do better to focus on the true “aggressors” that David Cameron highlighted this week but sadly, that would probably just be too logical a strategy for this monolithic organisation to follow.

     

    View the HMRC list of 9 defaulters at: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/defaulters/defaulters-list.pdf

     

    For a profile of Leona Helmsley, go to: http://thesteepletimes.com/tycoons/leona-helmsley-1920-2007/?position=14

  • Dominick Dunne (1925 – 2009)

    Dominick Dunne (1925 – 2009)

    This “Boswell of the bluebloods” was a writer whose tips came from unnamed sources and “waiter[s] serving [him] risotto at dinner parties”. (more…)

  • Greed ain't that good

    Greed ain't that good

    Matthew Steeples reports on the sentencing of Maria Michaela

     

    Today, Maria Michaela was sentenced to 9 years in jail at Harrow crown court for her role as the lynchpin in a fraud of epic proportions.

     

    Maria Michaela attempts to look remorseful as sobs in her mugshot
    Convicted fraudster Mary-Jane Rathie

     

    Termed as “Britain’s biggest female fraudster” by the Evening Standard, Michaela is someone I came across in Lennox Gardens, London. In the building where I lived, she was often spotted with an associate collecting money from a tenant, Stephen Hunter-Scott, also known as Stephen Short, who was jailed alongside her.

     

    In due course this Knightsbridge apartment was repossessed by an Irish bank but the aforementioned associate returned a year later and forcibly took possession. The apartment concerned was eventually taken back and sold on a short lease for just £200,000 recently.

     

    Meanwhile Michaela disappeared but it was not until she appeared on the BBC’s Crimewatch wanted list that she again came to my attention. On the show, it was reported that this woman, who operated under countless aliases that numbered “Joanne Sarah Pier,” “Anjali Sharma,” “Mia Cul” and “Nadia Ali,” had, with the help of a corrupt chartered surveyor named Mary-Jane Rathie, obtained loans of £10.5 million from HBOS and £2.5 million from the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2007 and 2008.

     

    Michaela, who may well in reality be called Bruna Louise, had posed as a wealthy South African heiress to secure the funds she supposedly required to fund the purchase of properties in Chelsea, Belgravia, Pimlico, Greenwich, Clapham, Stoke Newington and the Docklands. In reality, Rathie, who was bribed with £910,000 in cash, a £49,000 Range Rover Sport and a £143,000 Bentley Continental, vastly overvalued each allowing Michaela to pocket, for example, £6 million for a Cheyne Walk house that was in reality worth just £3.5 million.

     

    Whilst Rathie, a former employee of Ashdown Lyons, was jailed for 6 years in July 2011, the fraudster Michaela managed to evade capture for three years. She was eventually caught this January in Bexleyheath working as a mortgage broker. In various preliminary hearings, her pleas of insanity did not help her cause and nor did her unwillingness to provide evidence of her true identity. This morning, she got just what she deserved.

     

    Of her conviction, Detective Inspector Andy Fife of City of London Police commented:

     

    “Maria Michaela created a web of deception that duped banks into handing over vast sums of money and then perpetuated her crimes by assuming a new alias to try and secure more loans. False identities and a corrupt property surveyor were the tools she used to make millions, turning herself into one of the, if not the, most prolific female fraudster the UK has ever seen.”

     

    The lesson of Michaela and her cohorts, I’d argue, is simple. Greed may well be good in the eyes of Gordon Gekko, but the greedy generally get caught in the end and generally it is down to their own vanity. As she rots in her cell, perhaps she ought to consider this folly.

  • Redefining Rachman

    Redefining Rachman

    A different side to Peter Rachman is revealed

     

    Whenever the name Rachman is mentioned, the first things that come to mind are greed, extortion and intimidation. The word is so engrained in such that “Rachmanism” now features in the dictionary, defined as:

     

    “The exploitation of tenants of slum properties by unscrupulous landlords.”

     

    “Notorious slum landlord” Peter Rachman (1920 – 1962)

    Perec “Peter” Rachman (1920 – 1962) was born in Poland and the son of a Jewish dentist. He is best known for having built up a property empire of over 100 mansion blocks in London’s Westbourne Grove and Notting Hill areas in the 1950s where he evicted longstanding sitting tenants and replaced them with prostitutes and immigrants from the West Indies. Due to the relaxation of rent controls by the Conservative government in 1957 and as no other landlord was prepared to take them, he was able to charge these unfortunates whatever he wished.

     

    Rachman came to public attention after the Labour MP for Paddington North, Ben Parkin (1906 – 1969), became vocal about the poor housing conditions of his tenants. Parkin coined the phrase “Rachnamism” in his quest to put a stop to the activities of “rent racketeers” and highlighted him as someone who used violence to maintain control of “his manor.” The MP even went as far as to suggest that Peter Rachman’s death was merely a ploy to distract from his activities and the result was to leave the public engrained with a belief that this landlord was a “manipulative, grasping Jew” who symbolised the moral decay of Great Britain.

     

    Ben Parkin MP (1906 – 1969) on a CND march

    A Radio 4 programme this week, however, highlighted an entirely different side to Rachman. In The Real Rachman – Lord of the Slums, a “barrister turned investigative reporter” named Joshua Levine suggested that those who believe Peter Rachman just to be a sordid intimidator fail to see the true persona of the man.

     

    Levine’s witnesses, who number former tenants and Rachman’s biographer Shirley Green, do describe him as a “chancer” who was prepared to use the system to make money, but they also portray another side of this supposed “figure of evil’s” character.

     

    Nicholas van Hoogstraten (born 1945)

    One immigrant tenant stated: “He was the only one who ever did anything for us” whilst others added that Rachman was “well-liked” and “too soft to be a landlord.” He was a “benefactor” and “jolly” commented others who’d rented from him and a truly notorious modern-day landlord, Nicholas van Hoogstraten, failed to see the opportunist in Rachman at all: “It’s laughable. He had no wealth. It’s an invented moral [mission].” Rachman, equally, was defined as a man “affected” by his imprisonment in a Soviet labour camp in the Second World War by his former lover Mandy Rice-Davis and as someone who suffered true sorrow over the deaths of his family there.

     

    Levine’s examination recounts how Rachman, who drove a navy blue Rolls-Royce with a white interior, was built into a symbol of corruption and moral decay. Rachman, like so many other mythical scapegoats, it turns out only died with only one conviction: parking without lights. The truth, indeed, is often stranger than fiction.

     

    Listen to BBC Radio 4’s The Real Rachman – Lord of the Slums at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ng4h3

     

    Follow Joshua Levine on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/Joshua_Levine

  • Goodness, gracious, gaol

    Goodness, gracious, gaol

    Matthew Steeples updates readers on John Goodman’s return to jail

     

    The conviction of John Goodman in West Palm Beach earlier this year was a tragedy for all concerned but the twists and turns that have followed have been quite something else.

     

    John Goodman in court prior to returning to jail on Friday 12th October 2012

    Goodman, who sold his family business, Goodman Manufacturing, for $1.43 billion in 2004 and who also founded the International Polo Club Palm Beach, was found guilty of the offences of DUI Manslaughter and vehicular homicide on 23rd March.

     

    In February 2010, Goodman had crashed his Bentley Continental GTC at speed into a Hyundai Sonata and in the process catapulted it into a canal. Whilst the driver, Scott Wilson, was left to drown, Goodman fled the scene of the accident and later claimed he did not know he’d hit another driver. On the night in question, Goodman had settled a $272 bar bill for himself and friends at The Players Club in Wellington, Florida at 12:52am and had later drunk more alcohol after the accident in a “man cave” to “alleviate [his] pain.”

     

    Scott Wilson’s Hyundai after it was retrieved from the canal into which John Goodman’s Bentley catapulted it

    In May 2012, Goodman was sentenced to 16 years in jail but shortly afterwards was released on a $7 million bond pending appeal. At exactly the same time, a juror in the case, Dennis DeMartin, self-published a “tell-all” book, Believing in the Truth, in which he revealed that he conducted drinking experiments to see if he could get drunk after three vodka and tonics. After DeMartin was called in for questioning by Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Jeffrey Colbath, he stated:

     

    “I’m only human. I made a mistake, just like John Goodman made a mistake… What can I say? I’m getting senile.”

     

    John Goodman has spent most of the year under house arrest at his hacienda at 3665 120th Avenue, Wellington with his girlfriend, whom he also adopted as his daughter to protect his wealth, Heather Laurso Hutchins (also known as Heather Colby). In a further twist, Goodman was caught at the property by two of the $2,000 a day off-duty deputies employed to monitor him at 11pm on Wednesday in an upstairs bathroom with a small mirror. He was allegedly using it to pry open his ankle monitor and disable it with water.

     

    Though Goodman claimed he had hit the monitor on a shower door accidentally, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw of West Palm Beach County commented:

     

    “I think he thought, you know, in my estimation he thought that was going to disable it. [It] doesn’t work like that… He paid the price for it because he’s back in the ‘Gun Club Hotel’ [Palm Beach County Jail]. That’s where he’s going to stay.”

     

    “Think about what’s going on in America right now. You know you’ve got celebrities and people with a lot of money, they get arrested, they break the law. And, after a while they just think the rules don’t apply to them.”

     

    “Well, guess what? That don’t happen here. He gets treated just like every other person that’s in my custody. He violates the rules, he’s back in jail.”

     

    As a result, John Goodman will now temporarily remain in jail until the 26th November.

     

    We await the next twist in this case with anticipation.

     

    Read our original report on the case against John Goodman and his subsequent conviction at: http://thesteepletimes.com/the-fog/no-thank-goodnesses-for-goodman/

  • Martha Stewart

    Martha Stewart

    This “High Priestess of Homemaking” was brought up in ordinary surroundings in Jersey City, New Jersey but became a self-made business magnate, author, magazine publisher and television personality. A divorced mother of one, Stewart briefly dated Sir Anthony Hopkins but couldn’t help associating him with his Silence of the Lambs character, Hannibal Lecter, and so ended the relationship. Now worth some $638 million, she was jailed briefly in 2004 after being convicted of insider trading but has made a remarkable comeback in the years since. Stewart lives in Katonahm, New York and also has a 35,000 square residence named Skylands on Mount Desert Island, Seal Habor, Maine that formerly belonged to Edsel Ford, the son of Henry Ford. America’s “Queen of Entertaining” is a lady who has worked extremely hard and as a result she is deservedly one of the world’s most successful businesswomen.

  • The man who had it all

    The man who had it all

    The conviction of Asil Nadir

     

    Last month I visited a house I’d heard much about over the years in the company of Ed Burrows, the personable managing director of Barnsdale Lodge in Rutland. That house, located a few minutes from the hotel that Burrows so ably runs, was Burley-on-the-Hill House.

     

    Asil Nadir
    Burley-on-the-Hill House

    Now converted into apartments, this mansion was built in the 1690s to designs supervised by Sir Christopher Wren and was sold to Polly Peck tycoon Asil Nadir in 1991 for £7 million. Nadir planned to turn Burley-on-the-Hill into a luxury hotel and conference centre with two golf courses but this failed to come to fruition when his Polly Peck empire collapsed following a Serious Fraud Investigation. In 1993, he breached the terms of his bail and fled to Northern Cyprus and as a result Burley-on-the-Hill was sold to the property developer Kit Martin.

     

    Sick of being a fugitive, Nadir took the gamble of returning to Britain to finally face a trial in July 2010 but this has indeed been his very own nadir. Plainly believing that most documents had faded and his alleged theft of £150 million from the empire had been forgotten, this twice married Turkish Cypriot former business mogul was yesterday convicted on three charges of theft totaling £5.5 million. Aged 71, he now faces a lengthy jail sentence.

     

    At the end of the day, Asil Nadir, the man who had it all, had nothing.

  • Edward Putman

    Edward Putman

    This convicted rapist and burglar from St Albans won a £4.5 million National Lottery jackpot in 2009.  He carried on claiming benefits until he was caught but now claims he’ll pay back what he owes. Put him in the stocks.

  • Christian Gerhartsreiter (main alias Clark Rockefeller)

    Christian Gerhartsreiter (main alias Clark Rockefeller)

    A German who used many aliases but whose biggest pretence was to give the impression he was a member of the Rockefeller family. The Man in the Rockefeller Suit gives the best account of his exploits but it is for the 2009 parental kidnapping of his child, Reigh Storrow “Snooks” Mills Boss, by a Harvard graduate named Sandra Boss that he is best known. Jailed for four to five years after being convicted for kidnap, he was subsequently also charged with the 1985 murder of a Californian man named Jonathan Sohus. Whilst this fantasist of the first order rots in the clink, his former wife has built a new life in Knightsbridge, London.

  • John B. Goodman

    John B. Goodman

    John B. Goodman sold his family business, Goodman Manufacturing, for $1.43 billion in 2004 and founded the International Polo Club Palm Beach. This socialite and protégé of the $7 billion Ponzi-schemer Sir Allan Stanford, claimed: “I don’t know what happened” when put on trial for smashing his Bentley into a Hyundai driven by Scott Wilson in 2010. Bizarrely, he attempted to adopt his girlfriend as his daughter to save his fortune and after spending years under house, John Goodman was finally jailed for 16 years for killing Wilson in December 2014. Here is a case of an individual some called a “generous and decent man” who truly screwed up.