Benefit fraudsters book a trip to the big house

A gang of housing benefit assessors who used dummy claimants to defraud the taxpayer of £1 million are facing jail. Menelik Cowan, 37, and six other council workers paid the cash into bank accounts opened with false passports. Lambeth, Kingston, and Barking and Dagenham Councils were cheated out of more than £1m in the decade-long fraud which ran between 2006 and 2016. Cowan, his then girlfriend Natasha Francis, 38, his brother Hugh Small, 39, Cassandra Johnson, 38, Jessica Bartley, 35,…