Three construction industry professionals have been found guilty of draining £3.5m from a charitable trust in a “deliberate, premeditated and persistent conspiracy” which lasted ten years.
Quantity surveyors Anthony Green and Peter Beard, former partners in AE Green & Partners, together with architect Guy Pound, were convicted at Winchester Crown Court on Monday of defrauding Talbot Village Trust in Dorset.
The three charged the trust excessive professional fees for work on six construction projects between 1985 and 1995, including housing for students, the elderly and the disabled and related road projects on Trust land in Wallisdown near Poole in Dorset.
Their fees were not itemised in bills to the trust, but included as a percentage of the building costs in the contracts.
This disguised the true extent of the fees paid out by the trust.
In a statement, the Serious Fraud Office said: “The long period over which this £3.5m fraud was perpetrated and the common features of its operation across the six projects showed that this was a deliberate, premeditated and persistent conspiracy.”
Green, Beard and Pound will be sentenced at Southampton Crown Court on 19 April.
Harry Groom, an employee of the trust’s agent, Savills of Wimborne Dorset who died in 2000, was also involved in the fraud.
Groom was responsible for the trust’s business.
Groome retired from employment with Savills in 1994 and died in December 2000.
He is alleged to have allowed the excessive claims and failed to monitor the building works.
For his part in the conspiracy, it was claimed he received an illicit payment of £15,000 and was treated to foreign holidays.
Two other defendants in the case, Peter Hayward and John Parkinson of Bournemouth construction firm W.Hayward & Sons, were acquitted.
FPDSavills was not mentioned in the charges and is in no way linked to the conspiracy to defraud the Trust.
References: EGi News 18/02/04
