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

Author:Michael Gillard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK
Published: 2015-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Death threats, guns and gangsters

Page parked his Range Rover in front of BAT’s offices in the quiet central London mews and waited for Fahim Baree and Anjam Khan to emerge. They had agreed to talk in private, away from more irate colleagues.

Baree was under heavy pressure to get back their money, which when combined with BAT boss Rahul Sharma’s company investment stood at over one million pounds. Not everyone at the travel firm knew the full facts behind Baree’s involvement with Page. Most knew he was his best mate, but not all were aware that while finance director of ULPD Baree had deposited investors’ money in a CMC spread-betting account for the Royal Protection officer that was now £38,000 in debt.

Baree had tried for as long as he could to do what Page had asked of him and ‘change the nappies’ of loose-bowelled BAT colleagues by assuring them that all was well at ULPD. But the continued lack of returns and herd panic that followed had ended the popular delusion about Page’s scheme and the time for wet wipes was well over when he arrived outside BAT’s offices in early April 2006.

It didn’t take long for the black Range Rover to be spotted by Dharmendhra Patel, one of the last BAT boys to invest. He rushed to confront the elusive Paul Page. When he got there another BAT investor, Matthew ‘Mash’ Smith, had joined in. Mash had invested £50,000, almost half of which Baree had put into his CMC account on Page’s instructions.53

The conversation by the Range Rover was getting heated by the time Patel arrived.

‘Where’s our money?’ demanded Khan, a £170,000 investor.

‘When the barns are completed and I get money from other investments I will pay people off,’ Page told the group.

‘You’ve been saying that for fuckin’ ages, what’s the score, Paul?’

‘The barns will be completed soon and sold by the end of May. Your money is safe.’

It was a very confident performance, thought Jit Mandalia, another BAT investor who had joined the discussion. It was also a pack of lies.

The barns were way off being completed and Mortgage Guarantee just weeks away from repossessing them. Page had promised the finance firm a £100,000 sign of good faith payment that would hardly make a dent in the almost one million pounds he owed them.

It wasn’t that Page didn’t have the money. Days earlier he’d secretly secured £133,000 from Baree’s mother who had re-mortgaged the family home in east London. But the story of how this money was secured and then squandered casts Page and Baree in a shameful light.

Akhtari Baree was coming up to retirement as a social worker. She wanted to buy a place in Dubai to live near her family or at least as a holiday home. As a widow with grown-up children, she had no desire to get older in east London after a lifetime of dealing with its problems. Her Leytonstone two-up, two-down was mortgage free after the death of her husband nine years earlier.

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