Posts Tagged ‘bridging loans’

A chartered surveyor has been accused of “massively inflating” the value of a Staffordshire luxury manor house in order to dupe the prestigious Yorkshire Bank into giving out a £3m remortgage.

A member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, sixty-six-year-old Christopher Jarvis, of Hawcroft in Staffordshire, denies the charge of fraud brought against him at Stafford County Court this week.

He is accused of pricing Barn Beak Manor at nearly three and half times more than what other independent surveyors priced the property.

The court heard how Mr Jarvis valued the property at £4.25m when, according to Miss Jane Bewsey QC, other independent chartered surveyors came up with a best price of £1.3m. The property belonged to Paul Cope, a Stafford-based financier whose application for the remortgage was approved by Yorkshire Bank in January of 2008, following the £4.25 valuation.

The court heard how Mr Cope originally bought the Staffordshire manor in 2001 for £425,000 with a mortgage of £350,000. However, the couple continued to buy up the surrounding land, therefore raising the estate’s value.

As a result it was remortgaged several times and at the end of 2007 Mr Cope approached Yorkshire Bank for the £3m remortgage. The valuation report that accompanied the application, written by Mr Jarvis, read: “large detached country manor, significantly extended in the modern manner, set in 19 acres”

Its features included a detached lodge residence, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts, landscaped gardens, a substantial children’s tree house, terraces, a top of the range security system with electric gates, a gymnasium and solarium, a planetarium with a telescope, a two-storey office suite and boardroom, an alpaca paddock and “a 500m sweeping driveway”.

Mr Jarvis told the court that he believed the property to be “one of the best, if not the best in the Stafford area, with a standard of fittings considered to be peerless.”

He also said that he had been in the business for 42 years without ever having been investigated before. In an interview with the police he said: “It was done by me in the full knowledge of what I was looking at. There were no comparisons in this instance, because it was such a unique property. This was my genuine belief it was its true worth at the time. I strongly disagree with the valuation of £1.2m.”

However, Jarvis also admitted that his ‘doctorate’ had in fact been bought by a “Mickey Mouse” university in America and he is currently suspended from RICS.

Miss Bewsey said Jarvis had “a long standing business relationship going back over a number of years” with Cope.

“It’s the Crown’s case that Jarvis agreed with Cope to produce a valuation report giving that massively inflated valuation in order for Cope to secure that £3m advance.”

The case continues.

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An indebted mortgage and insurance broker has been ordered to pay back nearly £1.5 million of client money, after being found to have breached fiduciary duty and acted dishonestly.

Rienze Albert Joseph Asoke Silva, known as Joe Silva, owns a Croydon-based brokerage, Abbey Brokers Ltd. During a High Court Chancery Division ruling it was heard how he took the large sum from clients to pay off his own debts.

According to a report on FTAdviser.com, Mr Silva took nearly £1.5 million from his clients, Abdul Sattar Muhi Al Khudairi and Fathia Dawood Salman, a married couple from Iraq who cannot read or write English, in order for them to take out a mortgage on their home.

He advised them to take out a mortgage with Northern Rock on their London property, which is converted into five flats, so that they could transfer their properties  into their four children’s names in a tax efficient way.

However, having taken out the mortgage and handed Mr Silva £1.35 million after fees, the couple were told that their money was being held offshore in a 90-day notice Jersey bank account. In reality, the mortgage broker had paid it into a friend’s bank account, and was receiving signed, blank cheques for which he used to withdraw the money.

Mr Silva reportedly told his clients that the £1.35 million would be used to effectively buy each of the five flats in their children’s names, predicting that the process would take a few months.

Yet, more than three years after taking out the mortgage, none of the flats had been transferred and the funds had vanished. During this period, the couple were apparently left with sky-high interest payments on the loan, which stood at over £9,000 a month in December 2007.

The broker, who at one point spent £400,000 of the money within a three week period, argued during the case that his clients had given him the money to use for five years as he saw fit and had agreed to pay interest on the amount.

However, the judge ruled that this had never been agreed, saying that Mr Silva was liable for “deceit and dishonest advice”.

Before the hearing Mrs Salman said that her family had been “shattered because of this matter”.

When Debt Management Today called Mr Silva, who still owns Abbey Brokers Ltd, he said that he planned to appeal the judge’s decision and so was unable to comment further.

Masthaven is a competitive and quick way to meet your bridgingm loan needs.