Legal News

£12m ‘crash for cash’ conman told to pay back £1
Wed 10th Mar 10 - 16:00

Article written by Don Frame, March 4th 2010

The mastermind behind a £12m 'crash for cash' insurance scam has been ordered by a judge to repay just £1.

Mohammed Patel, 25, lived an affluent lifestyle along with his girlfriend Ettorina Hay after staging a string of car accidents to rip off insurance firms.

He is serving a prison term for his part in the scam – which involved him slamming on his brakes to cause innocent motorists to crash into his car.

But an attempt by the courts to claw back some of the proceeds of Patel's crimes has failed after he was found to have no visible assets.

Judge Bernard Lever ordered him to repay the nominal sum of £1 after hearing Patel had no means of paying the thousands of pounds he earned in the scam.

Patel is known to have enjoyed foreign holidays in Spain, France and Turkey and bought expensive cars while the crimes were being committed.

He bought his unemployed 29-year-old girlfriend Hay a £15,000 Lincoln Navigator, a £15,000 Mercedes Kompressor, paid for her house to be furnished, and gave her £1,000 a month spending money.

However, investigators could find no sign of any material assets stashed by Patel as they tried to recover some of the money he cheated from insurance firms.

Ettorina Hay, of Kirkby Road, Bolton, was ordered to repay £12,953 within three months and warned that she will be jailed for seven months if she does not hand over the money.

Police found her home well equipped with luxury goods, including a plasma TV screen, leather sofas and designer clothes.

Officers took away the Lincoln Navigator and Mercedes cars found outside her house and they have been sold at auction.

Hay was given a 12-month suspended prison sentence in October 2009 and ordered to carry out 300 hours unpaid work in the community, after pleading guilty to money laundering.

Patel, of Nottingham Road, Bolton, pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to defraud, seven counts of dangerous driving, and three of driving whilst disqualified. He was jailed for four and a half years.

A court heard he staged hundreds of car accidents, mostly at three locations: the A34 Handforth bypass, a roundabout in Eccles and a junction of the M65 near Burnley.

Patel deliberately braked in front of innocent motorists to cause them to crash into the car he was driving. He picked on lone, elderly female drivers because they were more likely to believe the crash was their fault.

He crashed the cars as a money-making service for other motorists and charged £500 to stage the accidents. They would then submit a claim to their insurance company saying there were up to four passengers in the vehicle who had all suffered whiplash.

Each crash was said to have resulted in an average £17,000 insurance claim.

The scam unravelled when Greater Manchester Police mounted a huge investigation after insurance company workers got suspicious about an "alarming number" of bumps at the Eden Point roundabout near Cheadle.

The scam was at first believed to have been worth £8 million, but later the total involved in the bogus claims was thought to be at least £12 million.

Patel, who admitted staging a sample of 93 collisions, is believed to have earned at least £46,000 for his part in the scam.

Sgt Mark Beales, who led the investigation into Patel, said: "If you consider he was alleged to be receiving between £300 and £500 for each for each collision and the number of collisions he staged, it's not hard to work how he was earning a lot of money from this scam.

"There's no doubt he has been able to spend some of his criminal earnings and enjoyed a lifestyle from those earnings.

“The money that the courts have taken from Patel and Hay is only what's left from their spending spree. If at any time he comes into any money in the future, clearly we will be looking to seize those assets."

Sgt Beales added: "Hay had her suspicions over Patel always having large sums of cash at his disposal, yet she took it regardless. She turned a blind eye to where it came from.

"She no doubt benefited significantly from Patel's criminality and now the justice system is taking money back for victims of crime.

"We will pursue not only criminals like Patel, but also those such as Hay who think there is nothing wrong with spending money that does not lawfully belong to them.

"The message is clear to anyone who thinks they can earn a living from a life of crime. You may think it is glamorous, but it will always catch up with you.

"Seizing cash using the legislation available under the Proceeds of Crime Act is essential if we are going to prevent crime from taking place and disrupt criminal behaviour."

A police source said: "He must have hidden some of this money somewhere and we'll be watching him."

Richard Biggs, Personal Injury Solicitor at Ralli comments:

"We have in the past reported in these pages about the “crash for cash” scam.  It involved staged road traffic accidents and has netted criminals huge sums of money.  It was refreshing to finally hear that one of the perpetrators had been convicted, hopefully sending out a message to others.

Unfortunately although the court ordered Mr Patel to re-pay a large sum of money he gained from the proceeds of his crime, they discovered that he has insufficient means to pay.  This may come as a huge surprise to many people given that he has been staging these fake accidents and garnering the proceeds for quite some time.

The Proceeds of Crime Act does give the court some power to seize cash and assets which have been gathered as a result of a crime.  Unfortunately it appears that Mr Patel has disposed of his assets or hidden them in such a way that they cannot be found (and therefore recovered) under that Proceeds of Crime Act.    I suspect that the court however will not let him get off so lightly and will continue to pursue him for some time until the money is discovered."