Manchester Evening News

Ex-Blues player faces prison over £5m fraud

- By HELEN CHANDLER-WILDE

FORMER City player Paul Sugrue is facing jail for a scam which embezzled £5m of public money reserved to train vulnerable young people.

Sugrue, 57, and former Welsh internatio­nal Mark Aizlewood, 56, were found guilty of fraud at a trial in London. The pair ran a company which claimed to provide apprentice­ships in football coaching which they claimed included training, work experience and payment of £95 per week.

In total, the scheme took £5m of money from the government-run Skills Funding Agency, set up to train young people.

Aizlewood and Sugrue, who played for clubs including City, Middlesbro­ugh and Cardiff City, ran the scheme through a business, Luis Michael Training Ltd (LMT). The pair, along with fellow directors Keith Williams, 45, and Christophe­r Martin, 53, submitted false documents to colleges to persuade them to do business with the firm – a provider of footballba­sed apprentice­ship schemes for young people.

They used references to profession­al football clubs on leaflets to make the company appear legitimate. Other defendants Stephen Gooding, 53, and Jack Harper, 30, helped to find learners for the fake scheme.

Gooding and Martin pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud by false representa­tion before the start of the trial last year. Aizlewood, Sugrue, Williams and Harper pleaded not guilty.

The group told young people from disadvanta­ged areas, many of whom were ‘NEETs,’ or not in education, employment or training, that they would be earning £95 a week while studying for an NVQ in Activity Leadership.

Apprentice­ships were supposed to have at least 30 hours of teaching each week. Most students on courses with Luis Michael Training Ltd received two to three hours. Many of the 3,000 students enrolled were ‘ghost learners’ who were signed up without their knowledge and never attended a single class.

Some of these bogus students were sourced from a summer football camp run by Harper, who signed up students to apprentice­ships without their knowledge or consent, said the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). Luis Michael Training allegedly forged the paperwork necessary to receive funding, including maths and English papers supposedly sat by apprentice­s. The group made some sixth form students on work experience complete the exams, telling them they were practice papers, according to the SFO.

When the scam unravelled, the Skills Funding Agency demanded some of the money back that it had paid to colleges for courses.

Schools and colleges had to return £3.5m, leaving some unable to provide other school services.

The apprentice­ships also included work placements, which LMT had promised would be with profession­al football clubs.

Instead of assisting with coaching, they did menial tasks like handing out programmes on match day and cleaning offices, according to the SFO.

Apprentice­s were not paid the promised £95 a week. Some were not paid at all, whereas others got just £10 a week. This left some students struggling to pay for basic needs like food.

The SFO said the £5m they defrauded from schools and colleges was spent on Range Rovers, shopping trips to Harrods and holidays to Paris. Sentencing of the six men is due on February 26 at Southwark Crown Court, London.

 ??  ?? Paul Sugrue
Paul Sugrue

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