Reality Here
(Bigotry there)
From its inception, Wikipedia’s site allegedly about Ashley Mote has been no more than a blatant attempt at character assassination by political opponents and busy-body malcontents...a vehicle for distortion and personal abuse.
Worse, the management of Wikipedia – if you can call them that – have consistently refused to accept corrections of fact, nor the addition of any information that might paint a complete and balanced picture. Instead their site focuses on one specific and hotly disputed court case. Much of the ‘information’ is wrong, incomplete or inaccurate.
Wikipedia, of course, wash their hands of any responsibility and make it impossible for victims of systematic abuse to contact them for help. All my approaches over the years have been totally ignored, as have my attempts at corrections.
The Wikipedia site supposedly about me is no more than spiteful revenge, built on distortion and invective. It is plainly the work of political opponents and certain individuals who carry grudges. One was sacked by me many years ago. I recognise his hand. He was – and apparently still is – interfering, arrogant and opinionated. Another website, also used to malign me, suggests that he is a vengeful busybody.
Wikipedia’s editors (as they choose to call themselves) are careless amateurs who ignore the essentials of editing – a passion for accuracy and balance, facts not opinion, completeness not partiality.
Worse, they and their sources all hide like cowards behind a cloak of pseudonyms. While they claim to provide ‘information’ about others, they lack the courage to reveal anything about themselves.
They act like whores, as does Wikipedia itself….power without responsibility.
Freedom of speech is paramount. But so is personal responsibility.
The Wikipedia site under my name does not reflect my life or work, neither as a moderately successful writer and businessman, nor – briefly - as a parliamentarian.
For anyone actually seeking facts about me – they follow. Anyone wanting to know the truth about my court case in 2007, my letter to the judge sent afterwards (see below) sets out all the relevant facts. I am happy for it to stand as an indictment of the political nature of the British judicial system, especially when bureaucrats feel threatened.
Ashley Mote – a short history
Born 1936 in London to a family with Huguenot and farming origins on one side and the Royal Navy, including Admiral Lord Nelson as an ancestor, on the other. Authors in both families. Both grandfathers served in the Royal Navy and saw action in the Great War.
Father qualified as chemist and optician and ran a successful retail business for over 30 years.
Married Nicky Goddard 1972, one son, one daughter and four grandchildren
Home : Nr Alton, Hampshire
Educated City of London Freeman School, 1944-52
Editorial assistant, Picture Post, 1953-54
Royal Artillery 1954-56
Reporter, later Markets Editor, Farmers Weekly, 1956-61
Public Relations Manager, three farming organisations 1961-69
Public Affairs Manager, Birds Eye/Unilever 1969-72
Self-employed script-writer and producer, business and commercial TV 1972+
CEO, QAV Presentations, 1974-1990
QAV Presentations specialised in providing commercial communications services to large multi-national industrial companies launching new products and services. Specialised in offshore oil, electronics, defence, financial services and construction industries. HQ in Woking Surrey, offices in Houston Texas, Atlanta Georgia, Singapore, Geneva and Stockholm. Over the 16+ years it employed some 40 people around the world and brought many millions of US dollars and other foreign currencies into the UK.
Along with over 100,000 other businesses, QAV collapsed as a result of the 1990 recession, when interest rates touched 15 per cent.
1990 – present day
Columnist, author, commentator and occasional public speaker.
2004-09 Member of the European Parliament for SE England (UKIP/Independent)
Ashley Mote’s Books
Political Memoirs
A Mote in Brussels’ Eye, 2013
A full, frank and controversial account of five years fighting the EU from within the castle walls. The first ever blow-by-blow memoirs of a British MEP.
Powerful hidden evidence wrung out of the EU revealing :
Industrial-scale institutionalised looting of British taxpayers’ money.
Indisputable evidence of endemic EU corruption and fraud.
‘Diversity’ the claim, ‘regulation and standardisation’ the reality.
Huge hidden cash piles as the EU demands ever more.
Big companies lobby the EU to squeeze out competition
Uncontrolled migration across EU’s eastern borders totally ignored.
Illegal seizure of power and control from nation states.
Dilution of national identities by mass migration and imported criminality.
3000 secret committees endlessly planning new EU ‘law’.
EU funds lobbyists to ‘demand’ new laws already in pipeline.
Refusals by the Serious Fraud Office and Scotland Yard to examine unequivocal evidence of illegal payments to Brussels.
EU officials deliberately misleading the House of Lords.
Millions in soft loans to the BBC to buy editorial support.
The European Central Bank authorising a flood of new 500-euro banknotes, used mainly by drug barons for money laundering.
“Nobody is responsible, everybody else is to blame, and who cares anyway?” – EU bureaucrat.
ALSO : the full story of the UK/EU’s connivance to throw Ashley Mote out of the European Parliament. It failed, but cost the British taxpayer over £1 million.
A Mote in Brussels’ Eye is available as an eBook on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00B40DWMS
Politics
Vigilance – A Defence of British Liberty, 2002
As one reviewer put it : "What a demolition job! Ashley Mote has smashed huge holes in the walls which have hidden the squalid truth about the European Union for so long."
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ashley-Mote/e/B001KCG8AI/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1
OverCrowded Britain, 2003
Faces up squarely to the consequences of large-scale immigration and the urgent decisions Britain needs to make, including the most important - recover control of our own borders from the EU.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/0954012410/ref=tmm_other_meta_binding_new_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=new&sr=1-2&qid=1405682228
J’Accuse…!, 2007
FREE with copy of Vigilance or OverCrowded Britian
We Want Our Country Back, 2008
FREE with copy of Vigilance or OverCrowded Britian
Light in Dark Places, 2011
Published essays and articles highlighting the changing face of Britain in the EU over the last decade. Many originally featured in Compass magazine. Light in Dark Places is available as an eBook on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Light-in-Dark-Places-ebook/dp/B006ISI4E2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1323253903&sr=1-1aces
Cricket
The Glory Days of Cricket – The Extraordinary Story of Broadhalfpenny Down, 1997
Broadhalfpenny Down is a unique cricket ground and The Bat and Ball across the road is a unique pub. Together, they were the centre of the cricketing world in the second half of the 18th century, when the modern game evolved. During that time, a country pastime became a national sport. As one reviewer put it : “This book brings both the time and place to life again. A must for cricket enthusiasts.”
(Revised and update edition due autumn 2014) (link to come)
The Cricketers of My Time – the original version by John Nyren, first published 1832, 1998.
When Ashley Mote was researching The Glory Days of Cricket, he discovered a previously unknown hand-written text of John Nyren's The Cricketers of My Time, a book first published in 1832. This volume is in Nyren’s original words.
(Currently out of print. New edition and eBook version due in 2015)
The Winning Edge – joint authorship with Jack Potter, 2001
Unique insight into the methods employed by Jack Potter in the late 1980s and early 90s at the Australian Cricket Academy, which turned a floundering international cricket nation into world beaters.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Winning-Edge-Techniques-Cricketers/dp/1903158184/ref=aag_m_pw_dp?ie=UTF8&m=A1V6VY2DZ62GK1
Business – out of print:
A Businessman’s Guide to Commercial Presentations, 1982
Cash Management for Small Businesses 1987
Other Personal Information
Sporting interestsCricket
Rugby Union
Golf
Motor Racing
Other Interests
Classical music
Opera
Theatre
History
Non fiction
Fine art
Gardens
Fruit growing
Memberships
Victory Service Club
Hambledon Club
Hampshire CCC
Authors Society
NADFAS
Cricket Society
Charities
Royal British Legion
RNLI
A Hotly Disputed Court Case
Of course it is possible the EU is still smarting over my investigations into corruption in Brussels and the success I achieved in exposing it during my time there as a Member of the European Parliament, and afterwards in my eBook memoirs A Mote in Brussels’ Eye See http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00B40DWMS
EU bureaucrats freely admit they have been investigating me for over ten years although they have now chosen to use the British police to do their dirty work for them. See http://amoteinbrusselseye.blogspot.co.uk/
The Wikipedia entry under my name gloats over the show trial I endured in 2007 when the EU tried to unseat me by exploiting an enquiry into my family receiving benefits after the loss of my business, income, home, source of pension and employment prospects in 1990. The implication on Wikipedia is that such circumstances do not justify the receipt of any state benefits. The fact that I took myself off benefits for a short time when I briefly found paid work is ignored.
Those same realities were also ignored by the jury of mostly young layabouts from Portsmouth (the most left-wing part of southern England) when I was accused of benefit fraud in 2007 and they found that I unlawfully received a total of £45,000 from the state over several years – an average of £124 a week to support a family of four - whilst I was attempting to rebuild my life and find a source of income.
Wikipedia, of course, wash their hands of any responsibility for these allegations.
Well, enough is enough. It is time the facts were better known.
After the trial I wrote to Judge Price. This is what I said:
17 August 2008
Judge Richard Price, Honorary Recorder
Portsmouth Crown Court
Sir
I have been deprived of the opportunity to clear my name through the English courts. That is a most serious matter.
Whilst I do not expect you to act on or respond to this letter, it is nonetheless a means of expressing my concerns at the way in which my case proceeded last August, both in your court and beforehand.
The delay in my writing after the House of Lords rejected my application is solely the result of my giving priority to my constituents in south-east England – as is their legal right. The summer recess has proved the earliest opportunity to address the issues that concern me and assemble supporting material.
First a fundamental point. I, and all witnesses, swore an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. What I saw over the weeks of the trial demonstrated that no such commitment was undertaken by the prosecution. Indeed I formed the horrifying impression that none of the lawyers present cared too much about “the truth”. Getting a conviction, or an acquittal for that matter, was all the trial was about.
Clarity of facts came a very poor second.
Say I am naive in not knowing this truth about due legal process. But, despite my age and apparent worldliness, I had not been on trial before, nor seen a trial in progress. I was appalled by what I saw and heard. My belief in our system of justice was totally undermined by the replacement of the normal courtesies of life with a weird surrealism masquerading as reality. [Counsel for the prosecution] Miss Greenberg’s behaviour was, at times, grotesque and I have written separately to the Bar Council about it.
What happened to me and my family after 1990, and how I struggled without funds to overcome the loss of home, business, income and pension to keep my family together, rebuild my life and create a new source of income, should have dominated the trial. Miss Greenberg ensured it did not. By sheer force of personality, and with a supporting cast of up to eight others ranged behind her, she overwhelmed my utterly outgunned Mr Donne [counsel for the defence], who sat mostly on his own, looking lost.
Perhaps that is normal. I don’t know.
The trial was first set for Lewes, then moved to Winchester and then, at the last minute, it was moved for obscure reasons to Portsmouth. Question: why hold a five-week benefit fraud trial, with much of the evidence based on the defendant’s business activities and the prosecution led by a head of chambers, in working-class Portsmouth of all places? The move from Winchester to Portsmouth meant there was no possibility of my being tried by a jury of 12 of my peers, as required by law. I am over 70 and spent half a lifetime in international business. Portsmouth failed to produce a jury of such people. Half looked like students and others well under 30, none wore suits or ties, three were practical looking housewives and one older man appeared to have spent most of his life in a pub. Who amongst them had any real understanding, let alone experience, of the international business world?
What does a jury bring to a case? The notes of a jurist suggest “nothing save his or her own prejudices. During their deliberations as a group they will come to a conclusion which is not perfect but which they believe will be acceptable to the community – a solution the community can live with.” And so it was.
Their verdicts were a demonstrable muddle. How can identical charges with identical wordings, apart from different dates, produce guilty and not-guilty verdicts on the same evidence? That cannot be credible. The best example was contradictory verdicts on two charges which were identical bar one day.
I deeply regret the decisions of the Court of Appeal to reject my appeal against conviction, and the House of Lords not to hear the arguments. The Court of Appeal’s decision means that a jury faced with identical evidence on all counts can find the accused guilty of some alleged offences but not others. I have learnt since that this appears to contradict much legal precedent.
The jury in my case was plainly confused, and it was hardly surprising. Miss Greenberg’s opening remarks set the tone. She opened with the remark that “this is a simple case”. No mention was made of the fact that it had taken the prosecution six years to assemble the evidence, and that evidence was still being sought even after the trial started.
Neither did she mention that the original ten charges, every one of which alleged ‘income’, were quashed just before the case came to trial. They were replaced by 25 new charges under the Theft Act, none of which alleged ‘income’. But they had the effect of increasing the maximum sentence on all counts to a total of 130 years in prison.
Each new charge included up to ten alleged justifications of guilt which were used a total of 147 times. One of the ten was added even during the course of the trial.
The new charge sheet, doubtless drawn up with the help of Miss Greenberg and her team, converted a simple allegation into a means of conveying to the young jury that here was a real villain and the full power of the state was here to crush him. It was a form of jury intimidation: “Gosh, he must be guilty – look at all this…”.
You told the 12 jurors they had to be agreed (beyond all reasonable doubt) on at least one allegation to convict on each charge. It did not matter which. We shall never know which one of the ten allegations the jury believed on each charge and which ones failed.
The effect of this approach by the prosecution was to create deliberate obfuscation of the consequences for other benefit claimants. Benefit officials can in future claim that all the accusations against me were relevant and successfully prosecuted, and no-one can prove they were not. Leaving aside whether this lack of certainty had, or should have had, an impact on restitution, some of the allegations were not even related to financial gain. They were ‘technical’ offences only.
But the way the jury was invited to make a decision on each charge means that all ten allegations represent a risk to other claimants in the future. That maximizes the DWP’s options and may simultaneously represent a serious erosion of the rights of others to a fair trial.
Throughout the trial there was an implication that I had an income during the period 1996-2002. But the prosecution never attempted to show a true source of income, let alone prove one existed. The idea was just left hanging in the air, obviously because the prosecution knew perfectly well that I did not.
In her opening remarks Miss Greenberg referred to me as “averaging £1000 a month extra income”. It was wildly wrong, misleading and, I suggest, irresponsible. Worse, at no time thereafter was any serious attempt made to justify or prove it. It was scarcely referred to again in those terms.
She told the jury without qualification that, because I had previously run a business, I was “used to dealing with administration and government departments”. That was another ignorant wild guess. As anyone with any knowledge of running a business would know, that is the last thing on which my time was spent. The company secretary, my PA and the company’s accountants dealt with all that. My job was to run the business, not the administration.
The total sum I was alleged to have defrauded/stolen from the benefits system was £73,000 in all, £63,000 of which was recoverable under the new charges, and that was reduced to £45,000 after the four non-guilty verdicts and one quashed later.
The prosecution always spoke about £73,000. Never ever was it broken down to even annual, let alone monthly or weekly sums of money. They always used the biggest figure because it made my alleged offences seem much worse. (My own barrister never got the point about using accurate weekly figures either, despite my efforts to clarify the mischief Miss Greenberg’s approach was obviously causing in the minds of the jury.)
Over the seven years 1996-2002 covered by the charges, £45.000 averages about £124 a week to meet the needs of a family of four (we had two children at home/university for much of the time), and rent a three-bedroom apartment.
Even adding in my gambling winnings, which averaged some £70/week (although such winnings don’t come in such neat regular lumps), the total was still just under £200/week for a family of four. In 1999, the government’s own official measure of ‘poverty’ was set at £273/week. So the benefits system clearly did not support claimants even to the poverty line.
Whilst this is right and proper, and understandably an encouragement to claimants to get themselves off benefit, it then makes no sense whatsoever to enforce regulations that make such efforts illegal. (I will come back to that later.)
My gambling to generate the capital I needed to start a new business and provide it with at least some initial liquidity was never properly explained to the jury. No expert witness was called to assist me in the matter. So this central part of my defence was never well understood in court. With hindsight this was catastrophic.
As well as time, it takes serious money to create a start-up business and grow it into a viable self-sustaining enterprise. It takes originality of ideas and strategy, a willingness to take risks with your own resources, total commitment, drive, and clarity of purpose.
Long before income is generated, there will be serious costs on basic research on the business idea and prospective clients, equipment and other essential operating resources, recruitment of key people, supplies and the launch of the company and its products or services. Much past experience suggests profits will start to arise in year three after two years of pain, hard work and difficult cash-flow. Any deep-pocketed investors will arrive, if at all, after you have already survived taking most of the risk yourself.
Neither Miss Greenberg nor Mr Donne – to say nothing of the jury – have had any such experience. To them these were just words. Yet they were dealing with a defendant whose whole business ethos was built on such experience. It was an unbridgeable gap.
So trying to convey adequately what I had been obliged to do in my attempts to get off benefit and support myself and my family fell on deaf and uncomprehending ears. It was impossible for me to start a new business with no capital and no assets to back any borrowings that might be available, even under stringent terms. So I used gambling to raise funds. Trading on the currency markets I understood from my previous business: buying and selling futures on margin to protect my exposure when trading abroad.
In my new circumstances I had to limit my risk exposure severely and my winnings were never remotely enough to back a start-up business. So I stopped the attempt and tried going into partnership with others instead. Those efforts also failed, again usually for lack of funds.
As the trial progressed it became obvious that the precise meaning of words used to talk about business finance were being misunderstood, and no attempt was made to explain them and their fundamentally different meanings to the jury.
Throughout the trial words like ‘money’, ‘income’, ‘drawings’, ‘reimbursements’, ‘turnover’, ‘gross profit’, ‘net profit’, and ‘taxable income’ were used as if readily interchangeable. Miss Greenberg tried several times to confuse the jury further by describing debt as ‘income’ as, accordingly to her, also was the recovery of necessarily incurred expenses in a start-up business venture. The prosecution deliberately chose to fudge and manipulate these words to hold their case together.
The prosecution also tried to argue that my increasing credit card debts were ‘receipts’, and that they represented ‘money coming in’. This gross misunderstanding of debt can only have been deliberate and was knowingly misleading. To suggest ‘debt’ was somehow ‘income’ was an indefensible and irresponsible attempt to mislead the jury.
Miss Greenberg broke an agreement between the prosecution and my son’s solicitors and used material supplied by them on his behalf on a “without prejudice” basis.
One of Miss Greenberg’s worst excesses during the trial was to attempt what I now know to be a form of entrapment of witnesses. Once I was on the stand and without warning she demanded that I sign documents allowing the release of papers allegedly relating to my past circumstances. To my astonishment my own lawyer was now not permitted to advise me. Neither did Mr Donne protest.
I was obliged to grapple in full public gaze with this issue without – at the time – having any recall of any of the relevant details. What was I being asked to do? In the end I signed, not knowing what was going on or whether I was doing the right thing. Miss Greenberg was in her element of course, goading me while I tried to think through what was happening and make a rational decision.
Much later I was advised that this form of entrapment is governed by strict procedural rules, and my barrister could have protested, not least because the prosecution could and should have made such a request directly through him much earlier in the trial. I also learned that the jury should have been warned about this entrapment and guided on how they should consider it. No such guidance appeared to be forthcoming in a form that I or – I suspect – the jury recognised.
A leading solicitor has advised since the trial that the prosecution were obliged to prove ‘intent’ to defraud. Not only did they not prove it, but they did not seek to prove it. I doubt the word ‘intent’ occurred, except in passing, from one end of the trial to another. It was certainly not set up by the prosecution as an objective to be proved. Neither, for that matter, did my defence barrister exploit the fact that there was no intent proven. Nor could there have been since I never did, and never would, intentionally defraud the state or anyone else.
You will know much better than I that there is good case law on the crucial matter of intent, so I merely draw your attention to its omission in my case.
For the record, despite our straitened circumstances my family and I have always been scrupulous about paying our debts. More than once over the years we have drawn the attention of suppliers and retailers to an error in their bill in our favour. On one notable occasion years ago the shop-keeper was so astonished he refused to take the difference – and his astonishment is a terrible indictment of the state of morality in this country today.
I recognise that it was not your problem that my defence was so inadequately presented. A series of direct questions to my legal team remain unanswered to this day:
Why was there no systematic analysis and destruction of each of the separate allegations?
Why were no witnesses called to refute the “extravagant lifestyle” allegations? Why did Mr Donne positively refuse to call any of the several volunteers who were eager to testify about our church-mice-like existence over the years?
Why did we not call expert witnesses to explain what it takes to start a new business, and to confirm that the debts I accumulated were because of my efforts to start a new business without capital?
Why did we not call our own expert witness to spell out that the totals bandied about by the prosecution did not even reach the minimum poverty level when taken over the time in which they were received?
Why was the indisputable proof of my account of JCCM finances [one of the business ventures in which I was briefly involved] not confirmed by our own expert accountant witness?
Why did Mr Donne, when it became obvious even to him during his attempted explanation to the jury, not stop, ask for a recess, take instructions and start again? Instead, he simply faded away. He plainly did not understand it, so what chance did the jury have, even if they were listening? Yet, properly presented, defence evidence totally demolished the JCCM part of the prosecution case. (Your Honour’s own remarks later suggested you were not clear, either.)
Why did we not call someone to underline doubts about the status of gambling winnings and exploit effectively the contradictory views of the Inland Revenue and the Department of Work and Pensions?
Why did we never ask the two key questions:
1. Would anyone of sound mind choose (during the late 1990s) to live in rented accommodation if they could fund a mortgage?
2. Would anyone of sound mind stand for public office if they knew they had deliberately defrauded the public purse?
Why did we allow the prosecution to make hay of my poor memory and destruction of old papers? Why was no expert witness called to give evidence about the aging process and memory loss, and – for that matter – why not conduct tests on me beforehand so that the risk of being accused of having a selective memory could be properly defended?
(In time everyone in that court will discover the horrors of not being able to remember details, especially nouns, as they approach old age. It comes with the territory, and being ridiculed for it was monstrous.)
Why did we make nothing of the destruction by the DWP of 1991-93 records and – most particularly – records of my first meeting with DHSS in February 1996 and first meeting with Chichester District Council later that month? Records of both meetings were either destroyed by the prosecution or not disclosed. Both were crucial to proving the accuracy of my defence. But we said nothing and presented no documents or independent evidence.
Why was the prosecution allowed – unchallenged – to claim I was being devious and manipulative by delaying approaches to past business contacts (despite doing so immediately I was asked by my legal advisers, incidentally)? Why were they unchallenged in claiming that I deliberately destroyed evidence when I somehow “knew” I might need it in several years’ time? Yet the prosecution’s cavalier statements about destruction policy of their own almost went unchallenged. They turned their problem of destruction into an advantage.
Why was no effort made to remind the jury that I was a total ignoramus when I first approached the benefits office, and went to them for a talk about my then situation not knowing what to expect?
Why did we not seek to have all Income Support charges thrown out because no B16 form was ever given to me, nor the consequences for the potentially self-employed on benefit ever explained? In fact, it seems the discussions I had in 1991-93 and again in 1996 were all flawed, since I was encouraged to create my own employment simply to get me out of the door.
Why was nothing made of the obvious contradiction between benefits officers saying in 1996 that, because of my age, there was no need for me to attend their offices routinely, and then at the trial accuse me of not telling them of my efforts to get off benefit?
Why was nothing made of the patently absurd idea that self-employed claimants can “work” only 16 hours a week to get themselves off benefit, even if unpaid? In such ludicrous circumstances, what criteria are applied to “thinking time”? Or “travelling time”? Who checks it?
Why did we make nothing of “intent”, nor taking myself off benefit in 1993? Even if I technically broke the regulations (which I never saw) a man of my background would no more try to defraud the benefits system than fly to the moon. The whole thrust of my defence was (or should have been) that I was trying to get myself off benefit, not milk it!
Why did Mr Donne tell me not to advocate my own case in the witness box, but answer as briefly as possible exactly the questions asked? Why did he then not ask me several crucial questions to allow me to clarify details absolutely central to my defence?
Those of us brought up in 1940s and 50s, and who served in the armed forces, developed a strong sense of self-reliance, duty, self-sufficiency. People like me do not wander into social security offices looking for handouts. We assume, especially at the age of 55 or 60, that it is up to us to recreate the means to support our family again and not sit around accepting poverty for the rest of our life.
I was then – and still am – deeply embarrassed that I was ultimately obliged to ask for state help. It took weeks of agonising before I summoned up the courage to talk to social services. The very idea that I went there to cheat a system I hardly knew anything about is almost comic, but for subsequent events turning so unpleasant and bizarre. Truly Kafkaesque.
I did not ask for housing benefit – I started the process merely by saying at my first meeting at the job centre “I have a real problem”. Originally, I did not even know that I might be eligible for housing benefit. If anyone had asked me at the time I would have assumed ‘housing benefit’ meant living in a council house.
At those job centre meetings I endlessly repeated that I had no wish to depend on the state, and that I would continue attempting to create my own source of income via a business, since paid employment was impossible to find.
I had found a fragment of a letter I wrote to the Employment Office in Fareham, Hampshire, dated 27 June 1991, the original now officially destroyed. It included the following sentences: “I am not used to the idea of depending on the state. I have always generated income for the state, not drawn on it.” Mr Donne had that fragment and made nothing of it in court.
There were written contemporaneous records of all the meetings and interviews over the years from 1991, and they were crucial to my defence. They would have proved that I was never warned of the limitations imposed on claimants trying to create their own employment, nor that such regulations could change without notice at any time. Nor was I warned that government departments had the power to recover payments, although it seems obvious enough now.
Nor was I alerted to the fact that officials could change the rules to invalidate my claim completely at any time in the future. One of the DWP witnesses, Mrs Sharon Fisher admitted “different decision-makers make different decisions”. So where does that leave someone trying to get off benefit? Neither she, nor Miss Carol Budd, another DWP witness who appeared later, understood that there is not necessarily a connection between being self-employed and having income. One is certainly intended to lead to the other, but it does not always follow and cannot be assumed.
Desperate as my situation was, had I known of these attitudes amongst officials, I would have walked straight out. I did not need to re-learn a very old lesson – never build a house on shifting sand.
Those same records would also have shown that there was never any suggestion that I should stop my efforts to support myself – quite the reverse. The line was “we can’t offer you anything – find or make your own”. Never, once, having told me that I should try to create my own employment, did any official then go on to say…BUT you can’t raise money, generate money or work more than 16 hours a week.
By failing to warn me officials effectively created the situation on which they later prosecuted. Under cross-examination, an expert witness for the prosecution admitted I had not been given the correct forms about being self-employed when I first signed on. But this serious administrative failure on their part was then simply swept aside as being of no consequence.
The benefits agencies failed to exercise a duty of care towards me as a claimant.
There are several serious consequences flowing from my convictions. If the prosecution’s case is to be believed, no-one on benefit can create their own employment to get off benefit without accepting the most impractical, counter-productive, irritating limitations on their work activities, and serious restrictions on the time they spend on them. In addition, they must make visits to the benefits offices every time there is the smallest change – for better or worse – in their circumstances which might – just might – be construed by one official as being relevant, whilst a different official next week ignores it.
Also, anyone on benefit who has a big win (on the horses for example) must phone the benefit office and take themselves off. Next day, if they lose the lot, they must go and sign on again. Patently ridiculous.
My case also demonstrates that ministers who complain about the numbers of people dependent on the state are talking humbug. They will have been told by their officials that trying to create your own work will inevitably lead to a breach of the regulations and therefore be potentially criminal.
Until 2004 there was no suggestion of a prosecution. That emerged after I had been selected for the 2004 elections to the European Parliament So there was a serious delay between the first signs of anything wrong (September 2001 when housing benefit was stopped without warning or reason), February 2004 when the threat of prosecution emerged, and the trial in July/August 2007.
Worse than that, of course, was the fact that the case concerned the period between 1996 and 2001. By the time the trial started, details of some 11 years previous were now under close scrutiny.
During that long delay, much had been lost:
- all pre 1996 meeting notes held by DHSS
- 1996 meeting with DHSS, despite its relating to an on-going case
- 1996 meeting with Chichester DC when housing situation was covered in detail
- records of Tanner Management, especially pre 1990
- all JCCM records, destroyed by the accountants
- most of my cheque book stubs and paying in books
- all records relating to spread-betting on financial futures
- winding up of my mother’s estate in 1997
- various personal contacts and records of ad hoc activities up to 11 years previously
Added to which my already poor memory meant I found myself constantly having to admit “I cannot now remember” about events up to 17 years earlier.
Six of the prosecution’s witnesses also had to admit a failure to remember details that far back. They included three expert witnesses from the DWP, the benefits officer of Chichester District Council, my former landlord, and my wife’s cousin who started JCCM and who could not even remember her own drawings from the company despite being absolutely certain I had drawings!
The prosecution’s deliberate destruction of records and widespread memory failure was catastrophic to the defence case.
Since the trial I have accumulated circumstantial evidence to suggest that both leading independent witnesses for the prosecution, Miss Rance and Mr Loh, were to some degree pressured into appearing. Certainly that was the case with Mr Loh who once told me he would have as little to do with Chichester District Council as possible. He reluctantly received several visits from Mr Clarke of CDC, a former police officer, who undoubtedly knew Mr Loh would not welcome a close tax investigation into his private business and complex property interests.
Equally, Miss Rance’s appearance was completely out of character for the nervous and unconfident person she is. She hates confrontation as her testimony demonstrated and she normally does anything to avoid it. Mr Clarke visited her several times – travelling from Chichester to Reading at public expense for the purpose. He knew she ran a cleaning business and would also have known that such businesses rely on labour from abroad (much of it illegally in the UK), cleaners get paid in cash because they might be on benefit and might also not want to declare any earnings for tax purposes. (During our brief time in business together I frequently asked Miss Rance to confirm that we were not at risk from such concerns. I usually got an evasive answer but feared the collapse of the business if I enquired further.)
Mr Clarke would have been well aware that hints of investigations would persuade Miss Rance to co-operate fully. And having got her co-operation he then created written evidence which caused Miss Rance great distress in the witness box when it became untenable for her to defend it.
Mr Clarke had less luck with my editor and publisher who is made of sterner stuff. She rebuffed several attempts to pressure her into becoming a witness for the prosecution. He was sent packing with a flea in his ear.
Clarke, like his boss Mrs Dring, were effectively bounty hunters, originally with bonuses dangling at the end of a successful prosecution. Unfortunately for them, by the time of the verdicts the DWP had rightly abolished any such dangerous incentives for benefits officials on the grounds that they seriously risked perverting the course of justice.
So we now know that investigators attempted to interfere with personal relationships and harass my family and other members of it (Miss Rance), my former landlord and my publisher. They showed no respect for my privacy and family life, in prima facie breach of Article 8 of the Human Rights Act.
You may also recall that the European Court of Justice has ruled that a defendant’s human rights are breached if the prosecution withholds information about its lines of enquiry from the defence ( The Times report July 2003). The prosecution failed to notify me or my defence team that they were interviewing Miss Rance, Mr Loh or my publisher. Neither did they reveal that they had made various legal applications in the UK and in other jurisdictions to obtain details of bank accounts they suspected were under my control. All of this appears to have been in clear breach of the ECJ ruling. Yet it has been ignored.
I may not like the EU, but so long as we are members I take the view that its laws are there to be observed. The rule of law is more important than the law itself.
Now I must deal with some the worst excesses of Miss Greenberg’s [prosecution] summing-up. She said:
a) And somehow it was a good idea, when interviewed by Mr Clarke in 2001, for Mr Mote to suggest somehow that this was an arrangement between those involved in Tanner Management and those involved in Caravelle who knew Mr Lowe, all of which was a lie, all of which was an absolute lie.
This was grossly inaccurate and can only have been deliberately misleading. The claim that our landlord Mr Loh [correct spelling] was somehow party to my previous business dealings with Mr Tanner and his companies is itself a lie, and utterly unjustified on the evidence given in court by Mr Loh himself!
b) You may think that he, Mr Mote, cannot seriously have thought that it was proper to put down as the name of a landlord, a non-trading company when he knew perfectly well that his landlord was Mr Lowe. You may think that his explanation that somebody at the Chichester District Council told him that he could put down the name of a company which had a vague link to somebody who had offered to guarantee the rent as his landlord; you may think that that is fanciful…It is a joke, is it not, members of the jury? I mean, if it was not so serious, we would all be rolling in the aisles. And the idea that Mr Mote thought that that was an appropriate way to behave is frankly nonsense.
The circumstances of my first meeting with Chichester District Council were correctly given in my evidence. In any case, if I had been involved in anything underhand would I have volunteered the full facts in the first place? Such unusual circumstances being freely offered surely confirmed their veracity. A document found in my lawyer’s bundle of papers proved the truth of my evidence. It was a contemporaneous note made by the CDC interviewer, and confirmed two things – that she did not properly understand what I told her and that she then gave me what much later proved to be catastrophically poor advice. Why Mr Donne [defence] chose not to use this key document I have never understood.
c) has Mr Mote accepted what the evidence makes quite apparent, that all of the transactions through Tanner Management, in and out, were his transactions. There is not a single document that connects anybody else with Tanner Management apart from a bank mandate.
This was never in dispute yet here are facts being presented as if there was some deceit or criminal intent involved. In evidence I even laboured the point that I had used what had been a dormant account, originally set up as the vehicle for a new business venture which did not proceed after my business collapsed, as a financial ‘bucket’ through which I put any monies to do with my efforts to create a new business and a new source of income. The obvious objective was to support myself and my family again and stop being dependant on the state – a situation I found, and still find, profoundly embarrassing.
d) Mr Mote’s whole business and financial practice was, throughout the time we are concerned, one of concealment. He concealed his personal bank account from the Benefits Agencies, so that they would not see just how much money he had been receiving in the months’ before his benefits were paid. He concealed his connection to Tanner Management, he concealed his funds via GNI/OSS/Cater Allen. He concealed the fact that OSSL was another of his companies and only admitted it when finally confronted in this court. He concealed his pension, he concealed his earning from JC Commercial, he concealed his connection to Caravelle. He concealed the true name of his landlord. His concealed the level of his rent, his true rent, for several years. He concealed his wife’s income from Tanner management and from his son. He lied about the mortgage, he colluded with his son to cheat the Inland Revenue and he involved his wife.
This diatribe was said for effect, and delivered with great venom. It was entirely based on a grotesque distortion of the facts as they had been presented in evidence. It was utterly irresponsible to the court and to the interests of justice. It was slanderous, malignant, evil, and intended to destroy me – a man who has been devoted to the best interests of his Queen, country and family for a lifetime. It was an outrage.
e) He claims not to remember where the very successful company which he ran for 20 years was registered. Now we know the name of it, one wonders perhaps whether we are going to find it registered in the Isle of Man or in Delaware or somewhere else. But the choice of Q International is very interesting. Some of you may remember having read, if not having lived through, I do not think any of you are old enough to have lived through the last war, but part of the Armed Forces during the last war used what were called Q-boats or Q-ships which were vessels that were designed to conceal their true identity. They were designed to creep up on their prey, dressed up as a fishing boat, perhaps flying under a flag of a neutral country and then, when their prey could not escape, down go the concealments and up go the guns and all hell breaks loose. You may think, members of the jury, that when Mr Mote conducted his financial affairs, he chose that name, Q International, fortuitously or deliberately to demonstrate that he is somebody who conceals his financial affairs behind shrouds and layers and does the best he can to ensure that nobody can discover the true position or at least to conceal it as best he can. We suggest, members of the jury, that Q International may have been the starting point of a career of concealment which has ended in this court before you.
So Miss Greenberg is given to snide asides and pettiness too.
It is impossible to credit that a supposedly leading QC could stoop to such shoddy levels to score a few cheap, misdirected and inaccurate points with a jury largely made up of youngsters and housewives. Worse, she was willing to do so without even attempting to establish any of the relevant facts first.
For the record, Q International (which was not even my choice of name) and its subsidiaries were all registered properly in the UK and some were also registered elsewhere in the world, where the group did business. The group quite properly paid tax in the UK.
Furthermore, during the course of those 20 years my company created over 30 new jobs on two continents, commissioned hundreds of thousands of pounds-worth of supplies from other companies, and helped bring into the UK for our many multinational industrial clients business worth hundreds of millions in foreign earnings.
How dare Miss Greenberg gratuitously insult those people and that success. She does not belong in their company.
For my loyal, extraordinarily talented, committed, hard-working and devoted team our contribution to the wealth of this country was, and remains, a matter of intense pride. Few have done more. How any British government, let alone a Conservative administration, could allow its policies to create an economic environment in which such a successful company could go to the wall – along with 100,000 others in barely two years – was then, and remains now, beyond comprehension.
f) All of the forms that he filled in were designed by him to mislead and to conceal. He set about obtaining benefits to which he knew he was not entitled. You may say to yourself, “But why would he have bothered if he had access to all this other money?” Well members of the jury, it is not for us to answer that question. It might just be greed; it might just be because he thought he could get away with it; it might be because he felt so incensed that financial mismanagement by the Government had resulted in the loss of his successful business and he thought he might get something back.
Pathetic and insulting. She had chosen to understand nothing of me or my life.
I now turn to some of your own remarks at the end of the trial.
You commented at one point that my alleged benefit fraud was completely out of character, and contrasted sharply with the rest of my working life. The obvious implication of that remark was that the verdicts were wrong – a conclusion reached by those who stood surety, one of whom was a prominent solicitor, and a great many others both at the time and since.
Immediately post verdict you said:
a) I have to make this absolutely plain to you; I am satisfied that substantial grounds exist for believing that if you were released on bail there is a real possibility that you might fail to surrender to that bail. During the course of this trial I have watched almost with incredulity your deceit about money. Even now I cannot say with any certainty that I know what your real financial position is or that I know what assets you have and have not got hidden away, never for anyone except you and perhaps your family to know about.
I and many others in the court that day heard these remarks with our own utter incredulity. Reading them again a year later generates the same reaction. What ‘substantial grounds’? What ‘deceit’? Is the truth not good enough in an English court of law? “There can be a great difference between what you know and what you can prove – but nothing can change what you know” – source unknown.
Pre sentence you said:
b) Now, you chose to dispute the allegations, you chose to plead not guilty and that was and is entirely a matter for you but it deprives you of the benefit of a discount for a guilty plea.
As an innocent man I could not consider a plea bargain. It was out of the question.
c) Indeed, it has to be said that you did not help yourself in your evidence to the jury. You gave every impression of being a thoroughly dishonest man and as cross examination continued it became clear that there was a great deal that you had not disclosed, including the existence of two other bank accounts.
I repeat – having my poor memory held up to ridicule was monstrous. You will know the horrors of a failing memory for yourself in time, and you – like all of us – will sadly not be able to escape them. (As you probably saw, nowadays I rely entirely on notes taken contemporaneously.)
d) You also, and I so find, went to a great deal of trouble to cover your tracks, to make it more difficult for the authorities to find out anything about you. You opened at least one company registered in the United States and you used post box addresses, first in the Isle of Man and latterly very close to your home.
Tanner Management Ltd was a dormant US company set up years earlier, with a dormant bank account in the Isle of Man. It made complete sense to use it to keep my attempted business efforts separate from any personal money. That was logical financial management and nothing else. As for opening PO boxes, that is what you have to do if your home cannot be used for business purposes. In any case, none of this was a crime nor done with criminal intent.
e) During the relevant period when you were claiming tax payers’ money as benefit in one form or another you were in fact receiving substantial sums of money, many tens of thousands of pounds about which you dishonestly kept silent to the authorities. There were two sources of money in particular, one by far the smaller was from the cleaning company, Jacq-Clean Commercial.. Your fellow director a cousin of your wife’s was perfectly properly drawing money from the profits, declaring it to the revenue and paying tax on it. You could not do that because you knew that you would have to declare it to the authorities from whom you were claiming benefits and you also knew that it would reduce or extinguish your benefit. What you did was to claim reimbursement of expenses which you had not in fact incurred, thus boosting the money coming to you but doing it in a thoroughly dishonest way, by falsely pretending it was honest reimbursement of expenses honestly incurred on behalf of the company.
I have dealt with this allegation earlier. In any case, again as mentioned before, we cannot know whether the jury believed a word Miss Rance said. I know she lied and had evidence to prove it which was never properly presented.
The simple facts remain – I drew my properly incurred expenses, and did not draw an income since the business never reached that stage. It is perfectly true that the state was still supporting me, but the whole purpose was to grow the business so that it could also support me and I could then escape the disgrace of being on benefit.
f) Your second and infinitely more significant source of money was the sums that you say came from your gambling on currency movements, whether that was the source of those monies or whether it was not, you knew perfectly well that it was money you had to declare and you failed to do so.
The status of gambling winnings was never established. No expert witnesses were called, and Mrs Fisher from the DWP even admitted she did not know the correct legal position. I knew gambling winnings were not liable to tax, and nor were the losses. Again I have commented further on this above.
Finally, I return to the wider issues.
My case had all the appearance of a politically motivated prosecution. I was disproportionately hounded, and blatantly discriminated against, more because of who I was (and still am) and less because of what the prosecution alleged I had done.
I may have been through the legal system, but it was not a justice system I recognised – and that was in large part the work of Joanna Greenberg and the team supporting her. Justice? I don’t think so. Lawful? That’s arguable.
For almost a lifetime I was under the impression that we are all entitled to equality and justice under the law, regardless of our status or circumstances. “Be you ever so high, the law is above you”. Hence the need to avoid discrimination and apply proportionality.
But it seems when politics and justice collide, as they did in this case, discrimination applies in spades and proportionality does not. Presumably Charles I would have agreed!
It is a long-held basic principle of democracy that the risk of vexatious or oppressive prosecutions should generate great judicial reluctance to prosecute or imprison the people's elected representatives. If there were a misunderstanding of the complex and ever-changing benefit rules in my particular case, why instigate a prosecution rather than an action for recovery of overpaid benefit?
Whenever before has anyone else alleged to have applied wrongly for benefit having lost everything, later faced such a trial? Would an enthusiastic MEP supporter of the EU have been prosecuted on similar facts? The unequivocal answer is ‘no’, and we all know it.
A deadly serious attempt was made to make an example of me, destroy my political reputation and stop my activities against the EU in Brussels and elsewhere on behalf of the voters of south-east England who want to restore the right of the British to govern ourselves. By your decisions that attempt to stop me failed, at least in large part.
An experienced leading barrister of my personal acquaintance, who for that reason alone was not instructed, has subsequently commented that the decision to prosecute must have been taken by a minister deeply hostile to my political beliefs and objectives.
From his own experience he wrote: “I could not name a senior civil servant sufficiently trustworthy to be able to form an objective view of your case, nor would I trust the department to make full and proper disclosure to the defence. In a political prosecution such as this one you tend to get a desperate desire to secure a conviction at all costs, with a strong temptation to manipulate the evidence and suppress exculpatory material. Then there are the special advisers. Typically these people are left-wing obsessives, with a burning hatred of their own country’s traditions. They are not the sort of people who can be trusted anywhere near a decision to prosecute. So far as I know nothing was done to insulate the decision [in your case] from political appointees.”
No doubt Miss Greenberg, a head of chambers no less, was their choice. Her acceptance of the brief makes her culpable, and a knowing party to serious political mischief.
The law was once championed as a shield for the protection of the common man. In the hands of today’s ruling elite it has become a weapon of the state and Miss Greenberg is a party to it. As a weapon of the state the law is now much to be feared. It is used ruthlessly to destroy opposition, however modest, wherever it is perceived. A prominent solicitor wrote in a letter to The Times in 2004 “Our legal system is now at the mercy of a government which does not respect human rights or the rule of law”.
Meanwhile, British taxpayers have to ask themselves why their government decided to spend over a million pounds of public money on a five-week trial about an alleged wrongful benefit payment of some £45,000 over a period of seven years? And what did it achieve? I recall your saying the case had ruined me, and in one sense the outcome was ruinous since I now also have to repay all £45,000 and a further penalty of over £20,000.
Much to my surprise and relief it has spawned a huge amount of support for my work as a crusader against the EU’s damaging interference in British affairs. In political terms the law of unintended consequences has since worked powerfully in my favour.
My lifetime’s support for the rule of law, and my instinctive trust in the integrity of the British legal system, have both been sorely tested by my recent personal experiences. But imperfections, however personally damaging, are no reason to give up the struggle to restore fully the rule of law in the UK, starting with the right to govern ourselves again.
(signed) Ashley Mote
PS: Like Oscar Wilde and others before me, I used my time well. The first draft of the enclosed [first edition of J’Accuse…!], which has already achieved a worldwide circulation well into five figures, was written in the library at Ford [open prison].
Judge Price did not, of course, reply to my letter.
Footnote: A full account of the events leading up to my prosecution, and the aftermath, is included in Chapter 18 of my memoirs A Mote in Brussels’ Eye
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00B40DWMS
