Fraudster who bribed RICS surveyor is jailed

A woman fraudster, described as the most prolific in Britain and at the centre of one of the country’s most notorious property cons, has been sentenced to jail for nine years.

Maria Michaela, 33, used more than a dozen different identities to con almost £15m in property loans out of high street banks.

She claimed she was an heiress worth £250m and used fake documents. HBS gave her four loans worth £10.5m, and another bank gave her a further £2.5m.

She used the money to buy expensive homes in London, including one in Chelsea and another at the back of Buckingham Palace.

The banks which lent her the money thought they would get it back when Michaela sold the properties on.

However, they were unaware that she had bribed Mary-Jane Rathie, a senior chartered surveyor, to write fictitious reports doubling the value of the properties – meaning that the loans they had advanced were far higher than what the houses were worth.

Michaela gave Rathie £910,000 in cash plus two luxury cars as a reward for her part in the scam. Michaela then defaulted on the mortgage payments and vanished for three years. Police finally caught her in January.

By that time Mary-Jane Rathie,, who had been a chartered surveyor with Ashdown Lyons, had been sentenced to six years’ jail for her part in the scam.

At Rathie’s trial, it was said she had inflated the valuations on five properties for a woman named Joanne Pier. The properties included one in Chelsea, and one at the back of Buckingham Palace. Rathie had valued the property in Chelsea at £4.2m. nearly twice the £2.35m value given by an independent surveyor later instructed by one of the banks to investigate the fraud.

The court in Rathie’s case was told that Joanne Pier had left the country and could not be found. It also heard that Rathie was initially so worried when she was offered a bribe to inflate valuations that she reported the matter to her superiors, before later succumbing to temptation.

Judge Timothy Pontuis told Rathie, married to a Met policeman who was cleared of concealing criminal property, that the matter had been ‘nothing short of a tragedy’.

At last week’s sentencing of Maria Michaela, three accomplices were also jailed: Guy Steel was jailed for four years for money laundering and attempted robbery; Stephen Hunter-Scott was jailed for five years on three counts of conspiracy to defraud, two counts of conspiracy to money launder and possession of false ID; and Saba Humai was given a 12-month sentence suspended for two years for money laundering.

Michaela had admitted two counts of fraud, three counts of conspiracy to defraud and two charges of conspiracy to money launder.

After the case, Andy Fife, of City of London Police, said: “We think she is the biggest female fraudster. We have not had any female on this scale before.”

Police believe the true scale of the fraud by Michaela, who is from Mauritius, during her 11 years in the UK, may be far higher than is currently known.