Cheshire solicitor in court on £50m mortgage fraud charges
A CHESHIRE solicitor was in court yesterday in connection with a £50m mortgage fraud.
Mark Knights appeared at City of London Magistrates Court alongside Kamran Malik of Birmingham. Both men have been charged with three counts of obtaining a money transfer by deception.
At the time of the alleged offences Mr Knights was working at the Manchester office of law firm Mace & Jones. Mr Malik was a partner at A&H Solicitors in Birmingham.
Neither of the men are now employed by the firms. The case has been transferred to Southwark Crown Court.
The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said the proceedings were linked to an investigation that led to six people being charged with the same offences in December following a complaint by the Cheshire Building Society.
The Macclesfield-based mutual, which is now part of the Nationwide, reported an alleged £10m commercial mortgage fraud to West Midlands Police in March 2006.
The SFO alleges that the defendants took part in a series of frauds whereby they dishonestly obtained loans from banks or building societies that were secured on six commercial investment properties. Each property was transferred between companies controlled by one of the defendants and his associates at highly inflated prices in a series of back-to-back transactions.
On the basis of the grossly inflated prices, fraudulent valuations and forged leases, the defendants applied for and obtained mortgage advances totalling nearly £50m. The mortgages were quickly defaulted on and the lenders suffered significant losses, said the SFO.
The other accused are: Ian McGarry, former head of valuations at commercial property adviser Dunlop Haywards Lorenz; Birmingham-based lawyer Fatema Patwa, sole principal of her own firm, Patwa Solicitors; Hardeep Sodhi who worked as a solicitor at Patwa Solicitors; businessman Laurence Ferrigan, a partner at a London company called the CFB Partnership; Saghir Afzal, a company director and property owner and Simon Lawrence a partner of Darlingtons Solicitors in, Edgware, London.
The Cheshire Building Society was not the only lender affected. In 2008 it won a civil case against Dunlop Haywards relating to its £10m loss.
