Beds-in-shed landlady must repay £235k
A SLUM landlady who rented out ‘filthy’ bedsits inside an illegal back garden extension must pay £235,000 or face two years in jail.
Zoofshan Malik, 47, charged each tenant £712.50 a month to sleep in the tiny, squalid rooms, which the council likened to a ‘Rio slum’.
She split the dingy 37ft extension into four rooms, and is known to have made almost £108,000 in four years. But investigators believe that she really made more than double that.
Malik was caught when her local council received a tip- off about the rooms in the garden of her £500,000 semi in Barking, east London. She pleaded guilty to renting out the illegal flats – dubbed ‘beds in sheds’ – at Snaresbrook Crown Court.
Recorder Mark Milliken- Smith ordered Malik to pay a £222,000 confiscation order in three months or face two years’ imprisonment.
He also fined her £2,000 and told her to pay court costs of £11,000.
Malik used a firm called Emerson Knight Estates Ltd, of which she was the sole director, to rake in cash from the tenants. Barking and Dagenham Councillor Laila Butt, of the community safety and enforcement team, said: ‘This illegal extension and filthy flats would not have looked out of place in a Rio slum.’
The practice of charging thousands a year for squalid bedsits – particularly in expensive cities – has caused community tensions. Some residents complain of large numbers of migrant workers sharing two or three-bedroom houses in residential streets.
Ministers said a recent crackdown across England had left 2,800 rogue landlords facing prosecution.