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The tale of four cunning old geezers fooling two sharp young whippersnappers into paying £6.5 million for 47 acres of land owned by someone else altogether must surely form the basis of a script for the next series of Hustle.
Last week ex-property agent Michael Downer, 71, from Bartlow, Cambridgeshire, John Clifford Williams, 65, of Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire and John Mervyn Jones, 62, from York were found guilty of conspiracy to defraud Nick Candy and his brother Christian, who are half the age of the grifters.
The three were sent down along with Malcolm Congreve Brown, 69, a solicitor from Farnham Royal, Bucks, who pleaded guilty in December. Judge Nicholas Wood (mid-fifties) was not amused. After a six-week trial at Reading Crown Court, the solemn judge sentenced Jones to six years and Downer to five years. Brown got four years and Williams went down for 30 months.
Nick and Christian Candy were making a name for themselves as developers of luxury flats at the time of the con in 2004. They've done well since. Next week the pair will preside over the topping-out of One Hyde Park, 86 flats in the £10 million-£25 million bracket close to Harrods, half of which are sold.
The plot in question stands a mile or so from Ascot racecourse. A burned-out house once owned by the Thai royal family stands in untended grounds which are owned by Saudi billionaire sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz.
"This was a great site," said Nick Candy, who says the deal came through reputable property agents acting for a reputable middleman, who had at least three more sets of intermediaries between himself and the fraudsters. "We planned to build a mansion."
A "waterfall" transfer was set up. This is a bit like a housing chain where completion takes place on all the properties back to back, except it's the one property that changes hands.
The Sunninghill site rattled though four or five different ownerships on the same day: each "owner" taking a pre-determined cut of the £6.5 million purchase price before title of the 47 acres came to rest with the Candy brothers.
Except, of course, it didn't. Nick Candy, who unhappily never met or spoke to any of the fraudsters let alone the owner, says: "I was told; you know that land we bought - we don't own it."
The Candys had been sold a pup by the plausible grey-haired quartet using the simple expedient of forging the ownership documents which are required by the Land Registry.
The brothers were understandably peeved and worried that HBOS, which had lent them most of the £6.5 million, would come after them for the cash. So they demanded the Land Registry pay up for their mistake.
After some legal protestations, £8 million of taxpayers' money was quietly handed over in 2005 to reimburse the Candys, HBOS and to pay the lawyers.
A three-year police investigation began, which resulted in the conviction of the fraudsters.
The Land Registry says the case has prompted a "wide-ranging review" of procedures and the establishment of a fraud unit. Slam that stable door.
At cross-purposes over choosing a Crossrail builder
A well-stifled row has broken out between the builders of Crossrail and Transport for London, over who is in overall charge. TfL, which is chaired by Mayor Boris Johnson, was asked earlier this month to approve two huge contracts.
The first was for the job of becoming Crossrail's Project Programme Partner. Crossrail bosses recommended that the £100 million job to supervise the builders be given to a US-dominated trio. TfL said fine, give the job to AECOM, CH2M Hill and Nichols Group.
But the recommendation by Crossrail bosses on who should get the job of actually building the central section of the 118-kilometre line was not accepted for "technical reasons", says TfL in full coy mode. There are four firms in the running - including giants Bechtel of the US and Laing O'Rourke of the UK.
It's not known who Crossrail recommended. But Boris apparently baulked at the idea of immediately giving the whole show over to the Yanks by appointing Bechtel.
Laing O'Rourke is lobbying for more weight to be given to the "Britishness" of the bids when they come up for reconsideration in a few weeks. This is all a bit tricky because, under European rules, you are not supposed to favour one bid over another on national grounds.
But both Crossrail and TfL have been spooked by the rows that have erupted across Britain over the employment of non-British subcontract labour. Crossrail can't obviously dictate the nationality of the workers who, they stress, will be "overwhelmingly" British.
However, just suppose Laing O'Rourke were to be appointed. It would obviously be in a better position to employ Brits drawn from its 31,000-strong workforce than those awful Americans ever could. This should at least be taken into account, should it not Boris? Laing O'Rourke yesterday proudly announced it was to hire 1000 new apprentices.
Smiles of the rich wearing thin
The wealthy are always with us, fortunately for Knight Frank. This week the posh property agent published a report which concluded that half of the 2000 rich folk cosseted by Citi Private Bank plan to buy more bricks and mortar.
The cash will be ready to hand. For the unsurprising news is that 60% of Citi's high-net-worth clients switched assets out of equities and hedge funds last year and lodged their cash in deposit accounts.
But how much cash? What is missing is any sense of how much poorer the rich have obviously become, except perhaps in the comfort provided in the 48-page document by Alain de Botton, no less.
In an essay on wealth the writer/philosopher quotes the Victorian social thinker John Ruskin on the real meaning of the word.
“It means an abundance of everything, from butterflies, to books, to smiles.” Try that on your wealth manager.
Now's the time for this project to power ahead
London's biggest white elephant was the fitting venue for the official launch this week of plans to redevelop 450 acres of land just a mile from the Palace of Westminster.
The venue was, of course, the empty hulk of Battersea Power Station. The 300 attendees were told by Wandsworth council leader Edward Lister of the adventurous plans for transforming the power station.
There were hints of a new diplomatic quarter centred on the planned US embassy and talk of the million-square-foot redevelopment of New Covent Garden. Sadly the New Covent Garden Market Authority put a bit of a damper on proceedings by hinting heavily the week before that work on its 57 acres will be delayed because of “market conditions”.
The fact this is exactly the right moment for the public body to commission starving architects to come up with ideas for delivery into a recovered economy in 2012-13 is of course entirely lost on the quango.
The market authority will no doubt begin work in Nine Elms at exactly the wrong moment — when everyone else does.
