Pay back time for housing benefit assessors behind £1m swindle

Two crooked housing benefit assessors who took part in a £1m swindle on the taxpayer must pay back hundreds of thousands of pounds or go back to jail. Menelik Cowan 43, 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 £1,025,912 in the decade-long fraud which ran between 2006 and 2016. Cowan, his then girlfriend Natasha Francis, 44, his brother Hugh Small, 45,…