Surveyor jailed for taking £1m bribes to help in £10m fraud
A chartered surveyor was jailed for six years at the Old Bailey today for taking £1million in bribes for inflating the value of homes in a £10million mortgage fraud involving properties in London's most expensive neighbourhoods.
Mary-Jane Rathie, 43, received £900,000 in cash plus a £143,000 Bentley Continental and £49,000 Range Rover Sport.
Her fraudulent valuations led the Bank of Scotland to pay out £10million in mortgages on five properties in Cheyne Walk, Cadogan Gardens, Chester Mews, Canary Wharf and Pimlico.
The fraudster who paid her and pulled off the mortgage frauds under the bogus name of Joanne Pier has since disappeared.
Rathie was found guilty of five counts of fraud and of concealing criminal property in 2007 and 2009.
Judge Timothy Pontius told her: "It's nothing short of a tragedy for a woman of your intelligence, qualifications and many years of exemplary hard work to appear in the dock convicted of crimes of very serious dishonesty.
"But they reflect an abuse of professional integrity and also a shocking level of greed. It is naive in the extreme to expect anyone to believe that you thought they were gifts from a very wealthy and generous woman with no strings attached."
During the trial, prosecutor David Durose told the jury that Rathie, of Waltham Cross, had worked at chartered surveyors Ashdown Lyons since 2003 and married in 2007.
Since her arrest she has been divorced from her husband, a Met officer working in collision investigation at the traffic unit in Euston. He was also charged over the fraud but cleared by the jury.
In March 2007 the woman known as Joanne Pier approached Ashdown Lyons asking for valuations on a large number of residential properties.
She claimed that she was in dispute with her father, a wealthy diamond trader, and was trying to extract the properties from the family trust.
Over the following months Rathie provided dozens of valuations to Joanne Pier. She valued the Cheyne Walk house as £6million after refurbishment and with a rental value of £270,000 a year. But an independent surveyor said the true values were £3.5million if refurbished with a rental value of £180,000 per year.
The property at Cadogan Square, valued at £3.2million, was only worth £1.5million.
