Four jailed in £6m mortgage scam

24 March 2010 | By Natalie Thomas

Southwark Crown Court heard how Ruth Ayinde-Azeez, Isaac Matthews, David Hunter and Jason Mercer conducted their lucrative fraud by targeting a number of properties across the UK, providing false mortgage applications for them and using the loans to fund luxurious lifestyles.

Another member of the group, Anthonia Akinyele who pleaded guilty to her part in the fraud, awaits sentencing.

One member of the gang, former part-time care worker, Ayinde-Azeez, claimed she knew nothing of the fraud but was found guilty of money laundering offences on the 10 March.

The other four defendants pleaded guilty to various money laundering offences and conspiracy to defraud charges at earlier hearings.

Following an operation by the MPS Fraud Squad in 2007, with assistance from Hertfordshire Constabulary, officers discovered that Ayinde-Azeez was involved in the scam.

She received payments of over £1.5m into her bank account which she sent to various associates in Dubai and she also owned a 20% share in a brokerage business that played a significant role in the fraud.

The brokerage business, named M Solutions and Financial Ltd, passed false mortgage applications to a solicitors firm and once the mortgage was approved by a financial body, the money would be sent to the solicitors client account and then on to two business accounts controlled solely by Akinyele and Matthews.

Their businesses, ’Isaac and Isaacs’ and ’Zikkito’, have now been dissolved and financial enquiries revealed that over £6m went through the accounts during the six week fraud.

Akinyele and Matthews dispersed the money to all those involved in the fraud either to be laundered abroad for further use in their scam or as payment for their criminal work.

Matthews was arrested in February 2008 at a Holiday Inn in Dartford and police seized one Rolex watch and one Gucci watch from him under POCA.

Akinyele was arrested at her home address in ChathamKent on the same day.

Detective Constable Terry Lambert from the Economic and Specialist Crime, says: “This was a meticulously planned fraud with involvement from a number of different criminals using seemingly legitimate businesses to launder huge amounts of money in a very short space of time.

“There is no doubt that these companies never saw genuine business profit and were only set up to facilitate this scam.

“The luxurious lifestyles they were living shows a complete disregard for the law and it also makes Ayinde-Azeez’s defence that she did not know anything about the laundered money laughable.

“We will now be looking to confiscate any assets under the Proceeds of Crime Act from those convicted.”

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