Fugitive on run with mum after he blew her six-figure payout
A been motherhim, mother Michael FUGITIVEa draggingjudge Ann’s aroundClarke revealedmoneyhis fromhas the sick but spent justiceworld yesterday. 75-year-oldis refusingall with has his to repeatedThree return years promiseshomeago he withwasto do sentencedher so. despite– in absentia disobeying– to orders three of monthsthe Courtin of prison Protec-for tion. The court has now moved to stop him selling his mother’s last asset, her £250,000 home.
Allegations that the 56-year- old has been misusing his mother’s money date back 15 years – to the time when she won a £775,000 payout from the NHS.
Delivering the ruling about Mrs Clarke’s property, Mr Justice Peter Jackson said: ‘Mrs Clarke’s situation is worrying. She is now aged 75 and in poor health. Her Blackpool property is in a deteriorating state.’
Calling Clarke’s manner ‘incoherent and abusive’, the judge added: ‘All that can be said is that it is unlikely to be in her best interests to be kept out of her native country. If the property was sold, the proceeds would be spent in whatever way Michael Clarke chose.’
Clarke has taken his mother, who is brain damaged and confined to a wheelchair, throughout Spain and as far as the Far East with his gay partner.
In July 2015, Mrs Clarke was pictured posing in her wheelchair next to two semi-naked male models with a caption by her son saying: ‘Mother meet- ing the nightlife’. He also took her to a gay pride event in Barcelona and, in a series of other photos, he described her as ‘out on the razzle’ and ‘on the p*** tonight’. Mrs Clarke won her compensation payment in 1995 following a series of suicide attempts prompted by divorce and depression. A court held that the Oldham NHS Trust failed to find her an in-patient bed after she tried to throw herself under a bus. The trust was found liable when, two days later, she ran in front of a lorry and suffered brain damage. Some of the compensation money went on the house in Blackpool. Court documents show that Clarke began travelling regularly to Spain and started tak- ing his mother with him. By 2001, a court deputy was appointed to handle Mrs Clarke’s money after her daughter Angela and son Kevin recorded ‘considerable concerns’ about their brother’s dealings.
The deputy, a local solicitor, continued to make payments to Clarke to cover his mother’s living costs. Until 2011, the Court of Protection heard, these payments were worth £60,000 a year.
The money ran out in 2012, leaving Mrs Clarke with only state benefits and her house, which is let to tenants.
The Court of Protection also ruled that a will made by Mrs Clarke leaving the house to her son has legal force even though it ‘has the hallmarks of being prepared by Mr Michael Clarke’.
The saga is the latest in a series of cases in the usually-secretive Court of Protection in which supposed carers who appear to have exploited vulnerable elderly people have escaped criminal prosecution or have succeeded in keeping money that did not belong to them.
Those who were granted anonymity include a rogue builder who stole tens of thousands of pounds from an elderly woman; a gardener who was given control of his elderly employer’s finances and took £60,000; and an accountant who charged his mother £400 a day of her own money to visit her.
Clarke’s jail sentence for contempt was handed down by Mr Justice Jackson shortly before the Daily Mail reported in 2013 that the Court of Protection was sending people to prison in secret.
Senior judges ruled that in future no one could be sent to jail without being named and their offence identified.
In a rant on his Facebook page, Clarke branded the UK judiciary a conspiracy full of ‘Masonic crooks and British mafia’. He accused the courts of conspiring to defraud him of property, money and justice. He claimed to be self-employed and to have studied ‘Common Law at British Constitution’.
In December, he posted ‘Cambodia next’, and boasted how he and his mother would be visiting the historic temples of Angkor Wat and Siem Reap, adding: ‘Why not? You only live once!’