Legal aid fraudster ordered to pay back ... £22million
A SUPERCAR- driving lawyer has been ordered to pay back £22million to the taxpayer after his firm faked thousands of legal aid claims.
John Blavo’s company took so much public cash that the Legal Aid Agency ranked it the second highest earner on the system.
Yet it was cooking the books on a breathtaking scale, with 23,000 fraudulent claims in just three years, a judge has ruled.
Bogus names were supplied, details falsified and in thousands of examples entire cases being claimed for simply did not exist.
And yet astonishingly Blavo & Co Solicitors was paid time and again by bureaucrats in what is thought to be the biggest legal aid scam in UK history.
Blavo, 57, a solicitor from Ghana, set up his firm in June 2011.
He lived a life of luxury with homes around the world. Neighbours at his £3million detached mansion in St Albans, Hertfordshire, grew used to a fleet of expensive cars on the drive including a Bentley, a Lamborghini and Ferraris, Porsches, Maseratis and Mercedes.
Blavo and his wife Lynne, 60, were once feted by neighbours until they became annoyed at their raucous late-night parties.
Their son Daniel, 23, and daughter Stephanie, 26, were privately educated. one neighbour who saw the family take deliveries of Murano glass chandeliers in the past, said: ‘Their daughter, for a long time, had a Barbie-pink Mercedes.’
Blavo’s firm grew rich from its legal aid scam. Its summer party was held at City Hall, overlooking the Thames.
Blavo & Co specialised in mental health law but also practised in clinical negligence, housing, immigration, family and criminal law.
It claimed legal aid payments on a mass scale, citing not only bogus names, addresses, dates and places for ‘clients’, but also inventing names of hospital staff, judges and dates of court hearings.
Shockingly, the Legal Aid Agency paid out the money for cases even when there was no record of them.
Blavo & Co grew so rapidly that by 2015 it had more than 200 staff in 18 offices across England and Wales, with a turnover of more than £11million a year – £8million of which came from public funds.
But the agency had started to examine the firm’s claims – and they found thousands of clients simply did not exist.
Between April 2012 and March 2015, the law firm had claimed fees for representing clients at mental health tribunals in 24,658 cases. Yet only 1,485 such hearings were found to have been held, meaning about 94 per cent of the claims were made up.
In November 2015, the firm was closed down by the Solicitors regulation Authority.
Now a High Court judge, hearing an application by the Lord Chancellor for the recovery of the public money, has ruled the firm had an ‘endemic’ culture of making fraudulent claims on legal aid and had practised ‘systemic fraud’.
Mr Justice Pepperall said that in some cases the fraud went so far as forging entire case files.
of 1,000 physical case files handed to investigators by Blavo & Co, hundreds were fakes.
He ruled that the firm was doing about 1,000 genuine cases a year, not the 9,000 it was claiming public funds for. At the High Court case last october, Blavo could have given evidence but he chose not to, leaving the judge to conclude he ‘ had no satisfactory explanation to give’. Instead, the firm sent a more junior solicitor to give evidence at court.
She said there were ‘difficulties with file management’ especially when a mental health hospital provided the name of a client that was not the name the patient answered to – citing one example of a client who would only answer to the name ‘God Almighty’.
But the judge ruled such anomalies could not account for the vast amount of public money being fraudulently claimed.
As Blavo was the managing director and sole shareholder of Blavo & Co, he ordered him personally to repay £22,136,001.71
Despite the judge’s ruling, Blavo has not been convicted of any offence. Scotland Yard’s fraud team is reportedly investigating but declined to comment.
Blavo himself did not respond to requests for comment.
The Legal Aid Agency said: ‘While the agency welcomes the judgment in this case, it would not be appropriate for us to comment further as enforcement proceedings are ongoing.’
‘Systemic culture of fraud at firm’