RATHIE:6 YEARS FOR COP’S WIFE WHO TOOK MORE THAN £1M IN BRIBES FROM CROOK
A Met police officer’s wife who accepted more than £1m in bribes to help a bogus millionairess carry out a £10m mortgage scam was jailed for six years today (mon).
Chartered surveyor Mary-Jane Rathie, 43, inflated her valuations of luxury properties in some of the most exclusive areas of London.
They included a £3.5m house in the historic Chelsea street of Cheyne Walk and a Mews house in Belgravia behind Buckingham Palace.
The fraud led to the Bank of Scotland paying out £9.52m in mortgage offers to the conwoman ‘Joanne Pier’ who has since disappeared without trace.
Rathie was rewarded with a total of £910,000, a £143,000 Bentley Continental and a £49,000 Range Rover Sport.
She and her then-husband David Rathie, a 47 year-old Metropolitan Police officer based in the central London traffic unit, spent the money on paying off a mortgage and buying a house in Broxbourne, Herts.
Mr Rathie was cleared of accepting the gifts after an Old Bailey trial after claiming he trusted his wife’s explanation that they were simply gifts. The couple are now divorced.
Judge Timothy Pontius QC told Mary-Jane Rathie that she had shown a ‘shocking level of greed.’
He said: ‘It is nothing short of a tragedy for a woman of your intelligence, qualifications and many years of exemplary hard work in your chosen profession to appear in the dock of the Central Criminal Court convicted of crimes of serious dishonesty.
‘These were grossly inflated valuations provided quite simply as a result of bribes offered and paid by Joanne over a period of at least three months.
‘It is plain you were to receive a cut of around ten per cent of whatever she obtained.
‘There is no doubt that your fall from grace is a particularly heavy one. The consequences however are entirely of your own making.’
The judge said that it was clear she had persuaded her husband to accept the gifts and added: ‘He may well have been fooled by you into genuinely believing you were not doing anything dishonest in return for these payments.’
The court heard Mrs Rathie had worked at chartered surveyors Ashdown Lyons since 2003 before her marriage to Mr Rathie in 2007.
In March 2007 a woman known as Joanne Pier approached Ashdown Lyons asking for valuations on a large number of residential properties.
She claimed that she was in a dispute with her father, a wealthy diamond trader, and was trying to extract the properties from the family trust.
Ms Pier also suggested that her grandfather had built the South African resort of Sun City and had a company in the name of Sun City Holdings.
The following month Mrs Rathie, who worked in the Finchley office in north London, reported to her bosses that she had been offered a £100,000 ‘wedding gift’ which was twice her yearly salary.
She turned it down but six months later accepted a similar sum without telling her bosses. The two cars were put in David Rathie’s name.
Over the following months she provided dozens of valuations to Joanne Pier including five properties at (107) Cheyne Walk, Kensington, southwest London, which sits on the banks of the River Thames; (flat 15) (99) Cadogan Square, Kensington; (52a) Belgrave Court, (26) Westferry Circus, in Canary Wharf, east London; (19) Chester Mews, Belgravia; and (flat 20) Belvedere House, Grosvenor Road, Pimlico, also on the banks of the Thames.
Rathie valued the Cheyne Walk house as £6m after refurbishment and with a rental value of £270,000 a year but an independent surveyor gave a figure of £3.5m with a rental value of £180,000 per year.
Prosecutor David Durose told jurors: ‘Mary-Jane Rathie provided dishonestly inflated property valuations for a third party.
‘At or around the same time as these inflated valuations were being provided Joanne Pier transferred money and two high value motor vehicles to Mr and Mrs Rathie on nine separate occasions between December 2007 and April 2008.
‘The prosecution allege this was payment to Mrs Rathie for dishonest valuations. The couple used the money to pay off a mortgage and invest in property.’
Mrs Rathie insisted she was giving honest valuations and claimed that they were all approved by Ashdown Lyons.
She told the court: ‘I basically knew I wasn’t intentionally overvaluing or letting the money influence the valuations.
‘I thought she was just trying to buy friendship, because she wasn’t asking me to do anything.’
Mr Rathie told the court: ‘Mary-Jane was adamant that she had not overvalued any property. I asked ”Does she want anything for this? Is she expecting you to overvalue, undervalue or anything in return for this money?”
‘She said no, it was a wedding gift.’
Her barrister John Lyons said that Rathie’s honesty was ‘worn down by the extraordinary temptation and size of the bribes she was being offered.’
Mr Lyons said she was now on antidepressants and added: ‘Her professional life is obviously ruined.’
Mary-Jane Rathie, of (5) Park Lane, Waltham Cross, Herts, denied five counts of fraud between May 30, 2007, and June 26, 2009.
Both she and David Rathie, of (40) Hobbs Close, Cheshunt, Herts, denied a single count of concealing criminal property between December 6 2007 and September 8 2009.
The couple also have addresses in Croft Terrace, Selkirk, Scotland, and Stansfield Road, Bournemouth, Dorset, registered with the court.
ENDS
