Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Is this the worst loan shark ever? For years evil Dharam Gopee flouted courts and regulators
EVEN by the standards of loan sharks, Dharam Gopee stands out as particularly loathsome.
Vulnerable consumers borrowed money at extortionate rates, secured against their homes, and then he sued for possession when they fell behind with payments.
The charlatan kept it up for years and was apparently unstoppable with one judge describing him as someone who would “dodge and feint with the system”.
Well, he’s not dodging any more, having finally been jailed for consumer credit and financial services offences.
His record was described as “a horrid pattern of exploitation” by Judge Martin Beddoe, sitting at Southwark crown court, London, with Gopee preying on “the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of many, many people”.
The prosecution was brought by the Financial Conduct Authority, its director of enforcement and market oversight, Mark Steward, saying: “Mr Gopee’s actions showed utter contempt for the law.”
From 2012 to 2016 he loaned £1million and clawed back £2million in repayments, registering more than 1,000 charges over customers’ homes at the Land Registry.
Gopee sued for possession of victims’ homes even after losing his consumer credit licence, making his loan agreements unenforceable.
His shameful history goes back almost 20 years to when he incorporated Halifax Repossessions Limited and Halifax Business Finance Limited, installing his then 11-year-old son as director. The real Halifax plc successfully took action against him for passing off.
In 2011, the then Office of Fair Trading revoked the consumer credit licence of his Reddy Corporation Limited, the only one of his companies to have a licence, citing “a large number of breaches” of consumer protection rules.
At the same time the watchdog refused to give a licence to a second of his companies, Barons Bridging Finance 1 Limited.
Gopee appealed and his objection was heard by a tribunal, where he was asked about one loan agreement and said, in a remarkable admission, that it “mostly complied” with the law.
The tribunal ruled that it was “unfair, improper and deceitful” of him to collect unenforceable debts.
Dozens, maybe hundreds, of repossession cases were heard by county courts, resulting in numerous companies.
Halifax plc forces him to drop “Halifax” from his company names. Consumer credit licence revoked. Numerous Gopee repossession cases clog the courts.
Courts impose restraint order. Gopee incorporates 14
Jailed for 18 months for breaking restraint order.
Banned from being a director. Released from jail. High Court shuts down his companies.
Jailed for 15 months for breaking restraint order again.
Jailed for three and a half years. appeals to higher courts. Judge David Mackie QC in the High Court stated in 2014 that Gopee won cases by withholding important information from the courts and “abused the legal process”. The judge also remarked that when Gopee or one of his companies lost a repossession case, they ignored orders to pay the defendant’s costs.
In 2016, he was banned from being a director for the maximum 15 years, but that didn’t stop him.
“We are deeply concerned that the
disqualification order is simply being ignored and that the current directors are a cipher for Mr Gopee,” the Financial Conduct Authority told the High Court.
It heard that he was collecting payments from clients in shops at night “to escape detection”.
Last year, his 14 companies were put into compulsory liquidation.
David Hill, a chief investigator with the Insolvency Service, told how they “pursued hundreds of borrowers for loans that should never have been made”.
By then, the FCA had obtained a restraint order against Gopee, which should have stopped the 63-year-old, from Westcliff-on-sea, Essex.
It didn’t and he was jailed for 18 months for contempt of court.
He promised to clean up his act, got released, broke the restraint order again and was sent back to prison for another 15 months.
That sentence will be completed in June and then his latest jail term of three and a half years will begin.
And, in a first for the FCA, he has been issued with a Serious Crime Prevention Order.
Maybe at last we’re safe from this remorseless predator.