Court orders fraudster to forfeit £400,000 profits on London flat
A BENEFITS fraudster who ripped off taxpayers has lost more than £400,000 of profits he made from rising house prices after the National Crime Agency seized his London flat.
Sean Doherty bought a Kilburn home for £55,000 with a deposit of £2,750 in 1998 and saw its value increase by more than 700 per cent to £460,000.
He has now been forced to hand over the property and all profits from it after a High Court ruling that he bought it with a fraudulently obtained mortgage.
Mrs Justice Laing said that Doherty — in jail for fraud at the time — used a false identity, a fictitious reference and dishonest declarations of income to buy the flat and that even his deposit had been generated by criminal activity.
The ruling — now upheld by the Court of Appeal — means the fraudster, who had just £30,000 to pay on his mortgage, will lose the £430,000 equity in the flat. He must also pay £17,000 costs. The NCA said Doherty, 59, was “an Irish national with a 20-year history of fraud”.
Its High Court action against him was taken using civil recovery powers. These do not require a criminal conviction but rely on a judgment by the court based on the probability of whether assets were bought with criminal profits.
Doherty was jailed for three years in 1997 for cheating taxpayers of £100,000 by using 30 fake IDs to obtain income support and housing benefit fraudulently. He was also imprisoned in 2014 for trying to open a bank account using a fraudulent Irish passport.