Chaos fears over private deals to build our hospitals
Police teams discover remains of tragic Bennylyn, 25, and toddler
SCHOOLS, hospitals and other public services face serious disruption if ministers do not prepare for £10billion of controversial PFI schemes coming to an end, MPs warned last night.
Taxpayers could also be landed with a huge bill as 200 contracts expire and ownership passes from private hands to the public over the next decade.
Private finance initiatives – embraced by John Major and Tony Blair – saw the state hire private firms to build new schools, hospitals and prisons, in return for huge annual fees over periods of up to 30 years.
But many ended up costing taxpayers up to five times the original cost, amid claims some hospitals were charged £333 by a PFI provider to change a lightbulb.
A report today warns of further costs and disruption, saying if the Government is not careful millions could be wasted on paying expensive consultants to sort out the hugely complex deals.
The Commons public accounts committee says the watchdog overseeing the contracts – the Infrastructure and Projects
‘Taxpayer could end up with a huge bill’
Authority – does not have all the information it needs, with some contracts held on obsolete technology such as CD-ROMs.
Public bodies like councils and NHS trusts also lack the staff and expertise to handle the deals, while some unscrupulous PFI investors could try to maximise profits by running down maintenance of the buildings before the deals end.
Committee chairman Meg Hillier said: ‘We are about to see a wave of PFI contracts come to an end.’ She said they need challenging carefully and in advance to ‘ensure that the asset is handed to its public sector owner in good order’.
‘The taxpayer could end up with a huge bill if PFI companies are not held to account. Public bodies and the Treasury need to be on top of this issue now.’
Union leaders called on the Government to take heed. The GMB’s Rehana Azam said: ‘PFI was a disastrous policy that saddled taxpayers with extortionate charges. As historic PFI contracts finally end, ministers must intervene to prevent a bonanza for private equity profiteers and fat-cat consultants.’
THE bodies of a mother and her toddler daughter have been found concealed in a house after a two-week police search.
Bennylyn Burke, 25, and twoyear-old Jellica were reported missing along with another child from Bristol, Gloucestershire, on February 17.
Police believe Miss Burke and Jellica travelled to a house on Troon Avenue, Dundee.
A man named as Andrew Innes was arrested two weeks ago in connection with their murder.
The bodies were found in a semidetached house which officers had visited on March 5 looking for the pair.
Police would not say last night why it had taken so long to discover the bodies. It is understood they were well concealed and had to be dug out by forensic teams.
Innes, 50, was arrested on suspicion of bludgeoning Miss Burke to death.
The software engineer is also alleged to have murdered Jellica by unknown means.
Post-mortem examinations will be carried out to establish the cause of death and formal identification has yet to take place.
But police said that relatives of Miss Burke had been informed of the discovery. Detective Superintendent Graeme Mackie, of the major investigation team, said: ‘This is a significant development in what has been a particularly challenging inquiry for everyone involved.
‘Bennylyn’s family have been informed of this development and we will continue to support them at this difficult time as our investigation continues.
‘The thoughts of everyone involved in this investigation are with them at this time. There
‘A significant development’
will continue to be a significant police presence in the area for some time.’
A seven-year-old child reported missing at the same time as the mother and daughter has been traced and is being supported by the authorities.
It is understood Miss Burke moved from the Philippines to Bristol around two years ago.
One friend in Bristol previously told reporters: ‘This has broken our hearts and we are all constantly crying.
‘Jellica was so happy and such a sweet girl. Bennylyn was a fulltime mum and her daughter was her life.
‘The last time I saw them was before the lockdown came in December. She looked so happy.’
Door-to-door inquiries have been carried out in the Ardler area of Dundee, where Innes lives.
Detectives are trying to establish Miss Burke’s movements in the period between when she was last seen and Innes’s arrest.
Innes appeared at Dundee Sheriff Court charged with the murders of Miss Burke and Jellica on March 8.
He is alleged to have carried out the killings between February 17 and March 5.
The first charge alleges he attacked Miss Burke by repeatedly striking her on the head with a hammer, or similar implement, and murdered her.
The second alleges he assaulted her toddler daughter ‘by means presently unknown to the prosecutor’ and murdered her.
Innes appeared from custody and made no plea before Sheriff John Rafferty.
He was fully committed for trial on Tuesday following a second hearing held in private.
EVERY foreign traveller will face a criminal check before they get on a plane to Britain under Priti Patel’s border clampdown, the Mail can reveal.
The Home Secretary will replicate tough US measures used to keep out people who pose a threat to the country.
Under the plans, all overseas visitors – including those from EU member states – will be forced to apply for permission to enter the UK before starting their journey. This will provide a chance to screen arrivals in advance of them setting off.
Travellers will have their details automatically checked against watch lists and criminal dataunhindered bases – and those who have previously committed crimes will have their applications reviewed to decide if they should be let in. Officials will be able to block dangerous people from coming before they board flights.
The plans – modelled on the Esta system of pre-flight checks introduced in the US after 9/11 – are due to be published this later month and will be included in the UK Sovereign Borders Bill in the summer.
The Mail revealed yesterday that the bill will also include controversial plans to send asylum seekers who arrive in the UK via illegal routes to a third country, such as Turkey. They would then remain there until they could be repatriated to either their home country, or the one they travelled to the UK from.
The plan is the latest effort to toughen Britain’s borders.
Currently, foreign travellers from almost 90 countries – including EU member states, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Israel, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina and Chile – do not need a visa to enter the UK for stays of up to six months.
This means British officials can have only limited information about them prior to their arrival at the border. Last year, the Mail revealed that hundreds of foreign killers, rapists and paedophiles had entered Britain without any checks. More than 2,000 serious offenders were arrested over a three-year period after arriving here
‘Extra level of security’
– a rate of two a day. Their convictions emerged only after they were arrested and officers requested police records from their home countries. Some arrived under EU freedom of movement rules.
Although EU nationals have their passport details checked against a ‘watchlist’ of suspected terrorists and foreign criminals when they arrive at the border, any convictions are unlikely to be raised unless they are a high-profile offender.
Alice Gross, 14, was murdered in west London in 2014 by a convicted killer who had moved from Latvia under freedom of movement rules.
Under the new plan, everyone other than British and Irish citizens will be required to have completed an online ‘permission to travel’ form as part of a new Electronic Travel Authorisation scheme. Rules will stop airlines from letting people board unless they have filled the form in.
The scheme is modelled on America’s Esta – or Electronic System for Travel Authorization – in which those going to the US must submit an online application at least 72 hours before travel and pay a $14 (£10) fee.
Passengers have to declare if they have been arrested or convicted of certain crimes including arson, burglary, assault, murder and rape.
They also have to declare if they have ever violated drugs laws or engaged in terrorism or espionage. Ministers here are yet to finalise details such as how long in advance of travel passengers will have to submit their details, the application fee, and what criteria will be used for
‘People who want to cause harm’
blocking someone from travelling. A Home Office source said: ‘For too long our borders haven’t been as secure as they should have been.
‘Now we have ended free movement and introduced our points-based sys
tem, we can add an extra level of security to our borders with these electronic travel authorisations and keep out people who want to come here and cause harm.’
Miss Patel will announce the scheme as part of her radical overhaul of the country’s border policies. She will establish new ‘legal safe routes’ allowing genuine refugees to secure the right to come to the UK directly from war zones.
But the proposals will also mean Britain takes a tougher line on unauthorised immigration. Migrants will be banned from claiming UK asylum if they arrive from a safe country such as France.
In a bid to end illegal Channel crossings, arrivals will be sent to a third country for processing.
The new measures will also include tougher enforcement action against people smuggling gangs, including the introduction of life sentences for the worst offenders, up from a current maximum jail term of 14 years.
THE trial of a failed property developer accused of drowning his wife to cash in on life insurance policies worth £3.5million collapsed yesterday – to the anguish of her family.
Donald McPherson, 47, was cleared of killing Paula Leeson despite 17 separate pieces of circumstantial evidence which created ‘clear and obvious suspicion against the defendant’.
Mr Justice Goose told a court that it was ‘clearly more likely’ McPherson had drowned Miss Leeson, 47, than her death had been an accident. But he said the prosecution had been unable to disprove the ‘reasonable’ possibility that there was an innocent explanation. Here we reveal the extraordinary story behind this shocking case.
PAULA Leeson’s family might never find out how she met her death in a swimming pool at a remote holiday chalet in Denmark four years ago.
But their abiding emotions as her husband’s trial was abruptly halted without a conviction this week, were of shock and utter disbelief.
When Donald McPherson, accused of drowning his wife, was cleared of murder and walked free from Manchester Crown Court, her family, there to hear the judge’s ruling, wept openly.
Miss Leeson’s father Willy shouted through sobs: ‘Oh God! Oh God! Unbelievable,’ while her mother Betty was too consumed by tears to speak.
Mr Justice Goose had just informed the courtroom that he was stopping the prosecution and as he did so, Willy Leeson could not contain his anger. Looking across to the dock he shouted: ‘Shame on you Don!’
Then, directing his fury at the judge, Miss Leeson’s brother Neville shouted: ‘God Almighty. You are making a big mistake.’ After the court
‘It seemed he had appeared from nowhere’
room was cleared, the family continued to react angrily. ‘I cannot believe it, I just cannot believe it,’ Willy Leeson sobbed.
The Leeson family did not attend court yesterday to hear the Crown Prosecution Service declare it was not going to challenge the ruling, having been warned this outcome – one they were dreading – was likely.
Reflecting on their daughter’s marriage, there is little doubt the Leesons rue the day Don McPherson came into their lives.
Willy Leeson – a successful businessman who ran his own civil engineering firm in Worsley, Greater Manchester – was blindsided. With no knowledge of McPherson’s past, to both Willy and Betty it seemed he had appeared ‘from nowhere’.
Willy, who had emigrated from Ireland to set up his business in the 1960s, and overseen its expansion into a million pound enterprise, was protective of his only daughter. They were a close-knit family and Paula, always cautious with money, was devoted to the son she’d had as a teenager.
Working in the family business, she focused her energies on handling invoices. Her pleasures were modest ones: a weekly Saturday visit to the hairdresser with her mum Betty, then a trip to the shops.
But this financial prudence seems to have been abandoned after she was introduced to the stocky New Zealand-born property developer via a client of her family’s firm. It seems she was quickly besotted with him.
After ‘whirlwind’ romance, they married at Peckforton Castle – a stately pile set in rolling Cheshire countryside – in June 2014 in what a court this month heard had been ‘a grand affair’ and ‘no expense was spared’.
The jury was told that no relatives of McPherson attended the ceremony, an omission the groom explained by falsely claiming he was an orphan or had grown up in a foster home.
The couple bought a £285,000 three-bedroom detached house in the comfortable Manchester suburb of Sale, which, since Miss Leeson’s death has been sold and is now worth around £650,000.
In keeping with the family’s closeness, the marital home, was just round the corner from Miss Leeson’s parents’ house, a gated £1million property in one of the area’s most sought-after roads.
Luxury off-roaders were parked in the driveway of their home yesterday but there was no answer on the intercom.
A woman who answered the phone at the family business said they were not planning on making a public comment on the collapse of the trial. From the outset, it seems, McPherson was intent on securing his future prosperity in the event of his wife’s death.
Within three years of the wedding, he had purchased no fewer than seven life insurance policies for the couple, paying premiums of more that £460-a-month – despite being overdrawn himself, the jury heard.
His lifestyle, however, did not match his limited means. He took flying lessons, paying for the sessions in cash, while his debts accrued.
He was also, it seems, deceiving his wife. According to one of his flying instructors, when Miss Leeson rang him during a lesson he would lie that he was working on one of his properties.
And then there is the deepening conundrum of that holiday that led to Miss Leeson’s death. Despite the fact that his 47-year-old wife ‘hated’ swimming and preferred city breaks, in 2017 McPherson – by now £65,000 in debt – booked them a property with an indoor pool in a remote part of Denmark, Manchester Crown Court heard.
Before leaving for the trip, she told her family she wasn’t even planning on buying a swimming costume, jurors were told.
But on the day they were due to fly home, McPherson called an ambulance, saying he had found his wife’s lifeless, fully-clothed, body in the 4ft deep water.
A paramedic called to the scene in Nørre Nebel on June 6, 2017, was surprised to see McPherson’s ‘very bad’ efforts at resuscitating her, the court heard.
Miss Leeson, who had been in robust good health but for a minor tooth complaint, was pronounced dead. And after breaking the devastating news to her horrified family back home in Sale, McPherson checked into a hotel, where he allegedly began transferring money ‘left, right and centre’ from a joint account operated by his wife – around £20,000 in total. He finished the evening by ‘tucking into’ a steak dinner, prosecutor David McLachlan, QC, said.
Before returning to the UK, McPherson allegedly set up an account with online support group Widowed and Young which the jury heard he later referred to as ‘like a Tinder for widows’.
The jury was also told that later he sent an email from another alias bragging about how he was going to spend the windfall accrued from the life insurance policies – thought to be around £3.5million – on expensive travel.
The motive for the killing was ‘the oldest and simplest one in the book’, Mr McLachlan told jurors.
A pathologist in Denmark initially concluded she had drowned accidentally – despite 13 injuries being found on her body including bruises and grazes to her head, arms and legs. As a result the case was closed by the Danish authorities.
However, after British police provided further information, Danish
‘Tucked into a steak dinner’
pathologist Professor Peter Leth changed his conclusion and said the cause could not be determined.
Giving evidence at McPherson’s murder trial, he said he had found more injuries than he would expect to find from a resuscitation effort.
Crucially, however, under crossexamination he accepted there was nothing to rule out the possibility that these were caused during efforts to rescue her after she had fainted and fallen in – at a time when McPherson claimed to have been asleep in bed.
The trial’s collapse means there is likely to be no closure for Miss Leeson’s family.
But after being left reeling by the phone call from McPherson to say she had drowned, her brother Neville turned detective.
The court was told that having successfully persuaded McPherson to hand over his wife’s iPhone, Mr Leeson Jnr correctly guessed the passcode – it was their dad’s date of birth – and discovered photographs and messages from the holiday had been deleted.
McPherson was interviewed four times, denying killing his wife. He suggested her injuries were caused when she ‘banged her head on the side of the pool’ when he was trying to pull her out.
He insisted she had known about the life insurance policies which he said had been set up to cover mortgage debts.
The jury were told that as part of the police investigation it emerged that McPherson had constructed elaborate falsehoods about his past life.
He was said to have lied about his upbringing: far from being an orphan he had, in fact, been born Alexander James Lang, and raised by loving parents.
His father Laurence Lang – known as Laurie – worked as an electrician in Manchester in the 1960s before deciding to ‘try his luck’ in New Zealand. There he met a local woman named Pamela, settling near Auckland where they went on to have two daughters and a son while Laurie worked in a maximum security prison.
Exactly how Alex Lang became Donald McPherson in the decades after he left New Zealand aged about 19 is unclear – he is understood to have used at least one other alias, Rob Jones.
So assiduously has he covered his tracks, it seems, media report– ing on the murder trial in New Zealand resorted to running online appeals for information about his earlier life.
Those who knew him in New Zealand told the Daily Mail he was always business-minded, dabbling in stocks and shares.
One recalled how his mother ‘treated Alex as their golden child he was never punished or rebuked and his sisters were never allowed to criticise him’.
‘For instance, he had a paper round but burned all the papers several times and Pam thought it was just Alex being clever. He also took money for gardening and weeding for neighbours but never did the work.’
A school friend recalled him as ‘bright’ and ‘studious’ with a fascination for computers.
What relatives regarded as ‘a blind spot’ – a refusal by his parents to countenance that Alex was capable of deceit – is understood to have caused a rift with his sisters.
However to add to the mystery, a hearing ahead of the murder trial was told he had a conviction for ‘serious’ dishonesty in around 2008.
About two years later he was on a holiday in Egypt and it was here that he met Mark Dickens, a selfemployed builder who was a client of the Leesons, and through Mr
Dickens his path crossed with Miss Leeson’s. Working for her father’s business, she was described by friends as ‘always immaculately turned out’ and generous ‘to a fault’.
McPherson moved to the Sale area, buying up properties before doing them up and selling them on.
Prior to the wedding, he owned eight properties worth more than £900,000, the jury were told, but it later emerged in court that this ostensibly impressive property portfolio was, in reality, heavily mortgaged, and he remained deep in debt.
‘Donald McPherson wasn’t really a man of means,’ Mr McLachlan told the jury. ‘He was more a man of straw.’
McPherson, meanwhile, was said during the trial to have told a friend he ‘resented’ the wealth of Miss Leeson’s parents, saying she and her brother would be worth ‘millions’ when they died.
In addition to the new joint life insurance products he took out, two existing policies which benefited Miss Leeson’s son were also amended to set up a trust controlled by McPherson, the trial heard.
Jurors were told that Miss Leeson’s will had also been amended to include McPherson as one of its beneficiaries and allegedly this
‘Never punished or rebuked’ ‘Only person who stood to gain’
change involved forged documents. While handwriting experts could not say who forged them, McPherson was the only person who stood to gain, the court heard.
In addition, in the run-up to the Danish trip, the court heard McPherson bought two travel insurance policies and upgraded his bank account to one with free travel cover, meaning three policies were in place.
The couple flew from Manchester Airport to Copenhagen on June 3, 2017 before driving 200 miles to Nørre Nebel on the North Sea coast.
Three days later McPherson called an ambulance, saying he had found his wife in the pool.
Denying murder, McPherson claimed he had been unable to pull her to safety due to a bad shoulder. However, the court heard days before the trip he had allegedly been carrying scaffolding planks around without assistance.
In a statement issued via his solicitor, McPherson said: ‘A tragic accident is what it was and it saddens me, deeply, that the events in question should ever have been seen differently and that I was ever suspected of playing a part in Paula’s death.’
The judge’s decision to order the jury to return a verdict of not guilty leaves the Leeson family facing agonising uncertainty – while McPherson will now find out if the way is clear for him to claim a lifechanging fortune.