LIBAN: SOMALI WOMAN WALKS FREE AFTER CHEATING £62,000 IN DOLE

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Snaresbrook Crown Court/ Nick Cullen
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23 September 2011

benefits…1

A Somali refugee who cheated the public purse out of more than £62,000 in benefits has been spared jail.

Ogbad Liban, 42, told the authorities she was living alone with her seven children, allowing her to claim thousands in income support and housing and council tax benefits.

In reality her van driver boyfriend Abdi Hersi was living with the family, paying the bills and letting her drive around in his car.

Liban was given a 38 week prison sentence, suspended for a year with 80 hours of unpaid work after she owned up to her fraud at Snaresbrook Crown Court.

She is already paying back the money she dishonestly claimed at a rate of 500 per month.

The judge Ms Recorder Dafna Spiro said she had decided to suspend the sentence after hearing that Hersi had urged his partner not to tell the authorities about her change in circumstances.

He has since disappeared from her life, leaving her to raise their four young children, and has ignored all her attempts to contact him.

Recorder Spiro said: ‘In my view, it is he who has benefited from this fraud, and he who has shirked, and continues to shirk, his responsibilities.

‘He has not had the decency to step forward to be a responsible parent, and you have had that added strain and burden with the anticipation of these proceedings.

‘The fact, though, remains that you were benefiting from sharing a household with him: him paying some of the bills and you using his car, and your behaviour was dishonest.

‘But there is very, very strong mitigation here, and I am persuaded to adopt the recommendation of the [probation] pre-sentence report [and suspend the sentence].

‘I fully accept that you are genuinely remorseful for what has happened.’

Liban fled to this country from Somalia in 1999 after her husband was killed in the civil war there. She had three sons from her marriage, the oldest of whom is now 17.

She was granted refugee status and then indefinite leave to remain, and is now a British citizen.

In around 2002, she began a relationship with Hersi, and the couple lived together on-and-off, first in one house and then moving to another.

They also had four children together, now aged seven, six, five and four

Robert Dalling, prosecuting told the court that Hersi worked full time as a driver for a courier company.

He said: ‘There is evidence that he made regular payments in respect of household expenses at the two properties they shared.

‘He would pay some of the bill for those properties and it’s also clear that Miss Liban, when she was visited by benefits investigators, was driving a car registered to him, and that car had a parking permit registered to Mr Hersi at the defendant’s home address.’

Between January 2003 and May 2009, Hersi received a total of £73,379 in housing benefit, council tax benefit and income support.

Investigators have calculated that if she had told the truth about her personal circumstances, she would not have been paid £62,599 of that.

Natalie Raphael, defending, said her client’s relationship with Hersi had not been stable, and that he was not living with her full time, in general staying with her two or three nights a week.

She said the longest continuous period of co-habitation between the couple was six weeks, and that at one point he ‘disappeared to Norway’ for seven months.

Miss Raphael told the court that when Liban spoke to him about informing the benefits agencies about their relationship, he told her to ‘wait until we are married.’

‘Essentially he was using her,’ she said.

The court heard that Liban has not heard from Hersi since 2010, despite her efforts to call him.

Liban, of (133) Mellish Street, Millwall, Docklands, East London, admitted two counts of failing to notify a change in circumstances to the authorities and one of making a false representation.
ENDS