ROYAL COURT
(Samedi Division)
30 January 1998
Before: FC Hamon, Esq., Deputy Bailiff and Jurats
Le Ruez and Quérée
AG
-v-
Edward Appleyard
1 Count of obtaining money by false pretences
Age: 48
Plea: Not guilty changed to guilty
Details of Offence:
Insurance Fraud, reporting £40,000 car stolen when it had not been, knowing this to be so.
Details of Mitigation:
Wife has psychiatric problems, risk of children going into care if custodial sentence. Act of mercy, one off, special circumstances, otherwise no doubt custodial sentence.
Previous Convictions:
Treated as first offender
Conclusions:
18 months imprisonment
Sentence and Observations of the Court:
3 years probation with 240 hours Community Service to be completed in the first year.
NMC Santos Costa, Esq, Crown Advocate
Advocate DE Le Cornu for the accused
JUDGMENT
THE DEPUTY BAILIFF: An Insurance Corporation paid out £50,000 to Appleyard on a claim that his Porsche had been stolen, when in fact it had not.
The facts reveal that he had changed the registration number of the car in Jersey, at a time when he and the car were in England. He then organised for an acquaintance of his to sell it. The acquaintance, a man called Brown, took the car to Scotland, apparently crashed it, and left it in a friends garage in Scotland where it remained until May 1996 - that is the only date that we have available to us - when the garage owner, a friend of Mr Brown, telephoned Appleyard to ask him when he was going to move it.
Appleyard had claimed to the Cheshire police that the car had been stolen from outside his mothers house in Cheshire. He knew that was false. He had already received the monies from the insurance companies, when he had that telephone call from the garage owner in Scotland, but he did not act on the information and inform the police or the insurers of what he then must have known were the true facts.
He did not disclose that he had changed the registration number of the car to the insurers, or that he had arranged for the car to be taken by Mr Brown, or that he knew that the car was in that garage when the owner telephoned him.
£50,000 are at present frozen by the insurers. This is not the recovery of the illegally obtained insurance monies - that was spent in some way by Appleyard - but part of the proceeds of the sale of his house and so the insurance Company will not be out of pocket. By a rare stroke of irony the Porsche motor car has now really been stolen by unknown persons from the garage in Scotland.
Appleyard has a criminal record, but there are gaps and explanations and we can regard him for the purposes of this matter, as a first offender. The Jersey cases seem to us to be inconsistent, but in R- v-Ruelle (1981) 3 Cr App R (S) at page 74, the then Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Lane, said of an insurance fraud:
"It needs scarcely to be said that that form of crime demands and will get an immediate sentence of imprisonment".
This Court has no doubt that that statement is entirely correct. This is a case which is unlikely to be repeated; the insurers will get their money back from the enjoined monies after the sale of the Jersey property and we have what Mr Le Cornu has described as an unusual and perhaps unique situation. Appleyards wife has a very severe psychiatric illness and that has been well documented by the medical reports that we have received, all of which are up to date. There is in particular a report from a consultant psychiatrist.
The family have two children, aged 3 and 5, who are entirely dependant on his continuing care although they live with Mrs Appleyards mother. Appleyard has, through his fraudulent activity, effectively ruined himself and there is no possibility, as far as we can see, of his ever again obtaining insurance to enable him to go back into the business which he understands. We have to say this: despite Mr Le Cornus cogent address, we have no doubt that a prison sentence in the light of this offence is fully justified. The background, however, is unique and we are going to exercise an act of mercy. Stand up please. You are sentenced to a probation period of 3 years and you will have to carry out 240 hours of Community Service in the first year under the control of the Cheshire probationary service. I am sure you understand that if you breach that probation order you will have to come back to Jersey and you will then have to face the sentence which we might have imposed if circumstances had been different.
Authorities
R -v- Ruelle (1981) 3 Cr.App.R. (S.) 74
R -v- Lusher (1994) 16 Cr.App.R.(S.) 313