Charged with fraud, lawyer at Baroness Brazen’s HQ

BARONESS Scotland’s term leading the Commonwealth Secretariat faces fresh controversy after one of the body’s lawyers was charged with fraud totalling £1.3million and money laundering.

The lawyer’s wife, who also worked at the Secretariat, has also been charged with ‘acquiring, using or possessing criminal property’.

Joshua Brien and Melissa Khemani, from Notting Hill, west London, face a series of serious charges, a court has heard.

Brien, 47, who led the oceans and natural resources legal department at the Commonwealth headquarters in Westminster, is accused of defrauding the Secretariat of £150,000 while he worked there – along with further frauds for three years after he left – by creating false invoices.

After he was sacked for gross misconduct, he is then said to have failed to admit it to his new employers.

Khemani, 40, who worked at the Commonwealth HQ helping member states implement United Nations rules on corruption,

‘Bedevilled by controversy’

is charged with two counts of money laundering, involving £62,000.

The couple, who married nine years ago and have raised thousands for charity, are free on bail awaiting trial, but Brien’s two passports have been seized.

Baroness Scotland, 64 – a former Labour attorney general – has been bedevilled by controversy since taking up the leadership of the Commonwealth Secretariat in 2016. She was given the nicknames ‘Baroness Brazen’ and ‘Baroness Shameless’ amid allegations she spent £338,000 on her grace and favour Mayfair apartment, and displayed high-handed behaviour and cronyism.

Brien was sacked soon after Baroness Scotland took office, apparently after she ordered a corruption investigation.

The offences allegedly took place between 2014 and last October.

Brien is due in Southwark Crown Court for a further preliminary hearing in September. Khemani, a Canadian, is due at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in October.