Michael Gillard - For Queen and Currency: Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace

Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace

Michael Gillard

For Sparkle and Cool Hand. Shine on.

This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader

Copyright 2015 Michael Gillard

All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The moral right of the author is asserted.

ISBN: 9781448215508
eISBN: 9781448215492

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No Old Bill ave ever admitted to what weve done The Queen is going to be mightily pissed off.

This book began with a phone call out of the blue one afternoon in the summer of 2008. The caller was offering an amazing tale that, on the face of it, had everything my news desk at the Sunday Times could want: royal indiscretions, high-risk gambling, brown envelopes and greedy, out-of-control Buckingham Palace cops striking gangsta poses on the Throne of England. All of which had seemingly taken place on the watch of Scotland Yard officers paid to protect the Queen and her family during the war on terrorism.

The man at the end of my Nokia identified himself as Paul Page, a 37-year-old recently sacked police officer. It quickly became apparent that the Yards anti-corruption squad, the Complaints Investigation Bureau (CIB), was investigating Page and he didnt like it. He spoke lucidly but with machine-gun delivery about how, as a Royal Protection officer for ten years, he was now facing charges of threats to kill and fraud. A big fraud, I would soon discover.

Page spat his version of events down the phone: I operated a spread betting syndicate from Buckingham Palace. Over 130 officers were involved. CIB stitched me up big time and I can prove it.

Id heard it all before, many times: another dirty cop trying to pin his corruption on the undoubtedly venal internal politics of Scotland Yard and the cover-ups that will continue to occur as long as we allow the police to investigate their own.

But Page was different. Through his verbal assault of fact, theory and fuck-peppered anger he made one thing crystal clear. You are not a shoulder to cry on, he said. I am not pretending to be innocent.

It turned out that Page had read a book I co-authored four years earlier about Scotland Yards phoney attempt at a no hiding place clean-up of corruption in its ranks. That book, Untouchables, exposed two decades of double standards and institutional cover-ups by the same anti-corruption squad that was now on Pages case.

As journalists we never know, when we slink, cajole and elbow our way into someones life, whether we will fathom them. Deadlines, impatience, cynicism and a lack of trust can all work against that aspiration. But I was lucky. When Page found me I found him to be in a confessional state of mind. He had an almost suicidal need to recount and recant for his past actions. And not just what had happened at Buckingham Palace.

Page was ready to blow the whistle on another hidden part of policing: a culture of violence, cover-ups and fit-ups so rarely exposed, let alone publicly justified, by those on the inside. In my experience, when an officer feels scapegoated by his own organisation he loses the will to maintain the siege mentality and conspiracy of silence around modern policing. Page was no exception. He explained:

At the end of the day, they are trying to airbrush out most of whats gone on and say I am guilty on my own. There are loads of people who should be standing in the dock with me. This is their problem: Im Royal Protection. When these Royal Protection officers are giving evidence you can imagine what it is going to look like. The Queen is going to be mightily pissed off. Thats the bottom line. Basically Ive threatened them and now Ive got it back Im happy to go to court. I want to go to court. Im not trying to say Im not guilty. Im guilty of something, Im sure I am. If its misconduct in a public office, so are others.

Page had run a gambling syndicate known to its members as the Currency Club. Essentially, it was a hedge fund for cops betting on foreign exchange rates and commodities such as oil and gold in the six boom years leading up to the 2008 crash. Initially, Page operated from the police locker room under the stairs at Buckingham Palace. But later, as civilian investors piled in on promises of returns beyond the dreams of avarice or financial reason, he would drop off cash in brown envelopes from a Range Rover with blacked-out windows that he drove from palace to palace and pub to pub.

I regret the day I ever expanded it further than just Buckingham Palace. It was the biggest mistake of my life because greed took over everyone, Page claimed.

The more I looked into the mechanics of the Currency Club, the more it looked like a Ponzi fraud of the kind, but not the size, perpetrated by Wall Streets kingpin, Bernie Madoff, on far more financially savvy and well-heeled punters.

Ponzi schemes, I learned, are quite simple in that early investors are paid from later investors money. Both Madoff and Page were facing trial at the same time. Their self-delusionary worlds had come a cropper as investor confidence sapped and the worlds financial system collapsed.

At his peak, European royals and British lords were among the investors in the illegal hedge fund Madoff had run below the regulators faint radar. His business grew not just because people liked and trusted Bernie but because he offered investors incredible returns, in return for no questions asked about how he made their money. Healthy commissions were paid to brokers and feeder funds for sending salivating investors his way; and the more they salivated, the more commission the brokers mopped up.

Page operated a similar system of lieutenants. Some were in the police, others were the friends of these uniformed investors. They worked their family and circle of friends for investment in his scheme and received secret commission payments for their enthusiastic advocacy. The whole greedy money-go-round carried on as long as Page regularly paid out the incredible returns he offered well above bank rates.

Before the prosecution could hang, draw and quarter him at the royal courts, I was able to cross-examine Page and his wife Laura about all aspects of their life and the insane way the Currency Club was run. Often this questioning was done amid the family chaos of trying to keep four young boys happy. To his credit, Page never dissembled or feigned memory loss.

Id like to think my questioning had left him little room to manoeuvre. But the truth is, it was Lauras presence during these sessions and her often withering interjections that stopped any real spin being put on the last eight years of life married to a gambler of other peoples money, whod gone into a free fall of bad decisions and excessive drinking.