Surveyor's fall from grace as she goes to jail for six years

A senior surveyor who accepted bribes worth £1m as part of a £10m mortgage scam has been jailed for six years.

Mary-Jane Rathie, 43, of Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, got money and cars in return for inflating valuations on London properties to secure the loans from Royal Bank of Scotland.

Last month, she was convicted at the Old Bailey on five counts of fraud and concealing criminal property. Her former husband, a Metropolitan police officer, David Rathie, was cleared of a charge of concealing criminal property.

Sentencing her, Judge Timothy Pontius told her it was a “tragedy” that someone with her work record was in the dock.

David Durose, prosecuting, said that the surveyor, who worked for Ashdown Lyons, provided “dishonestly inflated” valuations for a woman named Joanne Pier who used them to secure mortgages between May 2007 and June 2009.

Mr Durose said the client obtained more than £10m of loans, £9.5m of which relied on valuations by Rathie.

The offences relate to a riverside property in Chelsea; a flat in Belgravia near Sloane Square; and another at Chester Mews, at the back of Buckingham Palace, the jury heard. A fourth property was in the Docklands, east London, and a fifth in Pimlico, central London. Rathie valued one property at £3.2m when its real value was £1.5m.

Pier has left the country and cannot be found, the trial was told. It is not even clear whether she owned the properties or whether RBS can ever get its money back.

Pier had originally gone to Ashdown Lyons seeking valuations on a number of residential properties. She claimed she was in dispute with her father, a diamond trader, and that the homes were part of a family trust.

Rathie became suspicious after Pier offered her a £100,000 ‘wedding gift’, which Rathie turned down and reported to her bosses. But later, she succumbed to temptation.

Rathie’s barrister, John Lyons, said she is now on anti-depressants and her career is over. He said that her honesty had been worn down “by the extraordinary temptation and size of the bribes”. She used the money to buy a £660,000 home in Broxbourne, Herts, and paid off her then husband’s mortgage.

Judge Timothy Pontius told Rathie that the case was “nothing short of a tragedy”.

He added: “There is no doubt that your fall from grace is a heavy one.”