Law -
True Cases 6
A
blunder by judges allowed Britain's biggest
conman to keep £33 million he swindled from
vulnerable pensioners. Fraudster John
"Goldfinger" Palmer had the money
seized after being jailed for eight years for a
bogus Tenerife timeshare scam. Palmer's slick
salesmen ripped off an estimated 17,000 victims -
many of them pensioners who lost their life
savings hoping to enjoy their retirement in a
holiday home in the sun. After being jailed for
eight years at the Old Bailey and losing his
cash, Palmer ordered his lawyers to go to the
Court of Appeal in July 2002 over a £33,243,812
confiscation order and the cash was given back on
the basis that there had been crucial flaws in
the procedure followed. Lord Woolf, the Lord
Chief Justice, ruled that the court had
"misunderstood and misapplied" the law
and Palmer's case had been "wrongly
decided".
But Palmer will still keep his cash. Appeal
judges blocked an attempt by the Director of
Public Prosecutions to take the case to the House
of Lords - the only court with power to quash the
ruling. As a result they cannot overturn the
decision to quash the confiscation order - so
Palmer will keep the proceeds from the crime.
Norman Brennan, a serving police officer and
director of the Victims of Crime Trust, said,
"Who has got any faith left in the British
criminal justice system? Who said crime doesn't
pay? It's never paid so well for Palmer. A lot of
vulnerable people, who worked hard all their
lives lost their life savings and at the end of
the day his sentence, eight years, was not that
long anyway." Palmer, in Belmarsh Prison,
south London, is now the richest category A high
security inmate in prison history.
HM
Stanley Hospital in North Wales paid a woman of
57, £2m after she was left brain-damaged and
paralysed while expecting her third child.
A
convict won £75,000 damages from his local
authority in Bolton, after blaming his delinquent
behaviour as a teenager on the council's failure
to send him to the right school when he was nine.
A
man won a £200 damages claim against a doctor he
says gave him a cold. He filed the claim at
Salisbury County Court and was awarded £200
minimum damages when the doctor and Salisbury
District Hospital failed to respond in 14 days.
However, at a further hearing behind closed doors
at Salisbury County Court the claim was
dismissed. He was ordered to pay £750 costs plus
VAT to the hospital and £50 court costs.
A man won £600
from Wiltshire County Council after walking into
a road sign, even though he admitted he was not
looking where he was going.
A prisoner was
given permission to sue the Prison Service for
neglegence after he injured himself trying to
escape.
A pub landlady,
found guilty of a public order offence, was fined
£580 for displaying a football scarf with the
words 'Sunderland are Shite' above the bar in her
pub.
A
bus driver was sacked and fined £300 for
kerb-crawling in his double-decker. He tried to
buy sex as he returned to the depot after
finishing his shift but the woman he
propositioned was an undercover policewoman
posing as a hooker.
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