British conman brought to book

“I have cancer. I was trying to get back to the UK for treatment.” That was British serial conman and fraudster Brandon Pyatt, 64, who was finally caught after evading justice for 21 years.

He appeared in the Durban Magistrate’s Court on Thursday after the law caught up with him in South Africa this week.

He was convicted on a raft of fraud and deception charges in 1998, but skipped the UK to avoid his five-year jail term.

Looking older than in the photograph circulated by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), Pyatt was assisted from the Durban Magistrate’s Court holding cells up the steps into the courtroom.

The court was empty save for officials as Pyatt, who has been adept in evading authorities in the UK and South Africa, shuffled into the dock dressed in baggy clothes and unkempt long grey hair.

While the charges he faced were theft of a motor vehicle and/or using a motor vehicle without consent which dated back to a Durban-based charges laid in 2014, Pyatt had spent years on the run from UK authorities who arrested him for defrauding a number of victims of thousands of pounds in the 1990s.

Pyatt, from Manchester, skipped bail during his trial on charges of fraud and corruption at Chester Crown Court and it is believed he used a number of false identities to evade capture over the next two decades.

Facing magistrate Kevin Bruorton in court on Thursday, Pyatt said he had been caught at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg while trying to return home, adding that a warrant of arrest had been issued for him by Interpol for “offences committed 25 years ago”.

Gripping the edge of the dock, he said: “I have cancer, and I was going back to the UK for treatment when I was detained.”

He refused the offer of a lawyer. During proceedings State public prosecutor Mahomed Riaz Hoosen said the owner of a blue Jeep Cherokee for whom Pyatt had worked in Durban had laid the charges against the accused.

The charges allege that Pyatt had disappeared with the vehicle. Because it was a first appearance, details were sketchy, but it appeared that the criminal charges laid in Durban were flagged when Pyatt was placed in the Kgosi Mampuru Prison Hospital in Pretoria after he was detained.

The date of his arrest was not revealed during the court hearing.

This week, according to British media, UK NCA officer Danny Murphy, who originally worked on the Pyatt investigation in 1998 and has been looking for Pyatt since he vanished, said: “The arrest of Pyatt brings me great personal satisfaction. We never gave up and his eventual capture is testament to the hard work of NCA officers in the UK and abroad and the South African authorities. I hope the victims of Pyatt’s offending will now experience some form of closure knowing that he is finally behind bars and I thank them for their patience over the last two decades.”

Pyatt is expected back in court later this month.

BRANDON PYATT