The London Evening Standard reports on another fraudster robbing the public in the UK. This one is Virendra Rastogi who has cost more than £5Million i

0500 Hrs GMT London

Monday 05 March 2012.

Editor © Muhammad Haque

The London Evening Standard reports on another fraudster robbing the public in the UK. This one is Virendra Rastogi who has cost more than £5Million in reported legal aid fees paid for his defence! While at the same time he owns Mayfair property worth £6Million! ]

Where is any sense in that?

Yet the Rastogi fraud is not being treated by the main tabloids have not made anything of it. [The MIRROR, the SUN, The Daily STAR, Daily Express and Daily Mail of London]

The tabloid "newspapers"’ decision to treat this fraudster with kid gloves is very strange...

What would those same tabloids say if Virendra Rastogi had been accused of being poor and on “benefits”?

Divide £5 million by 1000 representing the number of benefit claimants in a London Borough and you can begin to see how huge the Virendra Rastogi legal aid bill is.

Yet no newspaper has called Virednrda’s humanity into question. No one ahs given any information about his family or about the number of children he has if he is married and so on.

I am NOT arguing that those details ought to have been palsied. What I AM arguing for is that the treatment of this fraudster by the British tabloid "newspapers" so far shows that they have shown [whether willingly or under any secret injunctions] remarkable restraint in the face of overwhelming evidence of massive amount of fraud by a known crook at the expense of the UK public, something they would not show if he were caught claiming benefit!

The question is: what was his “defence” based on?

It looks that even the “Judge” was “understanding” of the fraudster’s entitlements to £millions of public money for his “legal defence” “team”!

[To be continued]

From the London EVENING STANDAERD web site accessed at 0450 Hrs GMT London Monday 05 March 2012.

artin Bentham

02 March 2012

A fraudster with a Mayfair home who became one of Britain's richest men has received m

more than £5 million in legal aid, the Evening Standard reveals today.

Virendra Rastogi still owns a £6 million seven-bedroom flat in Portman Square and was chauffeur-driven everywhere before being jailed for an international trading scam that earned him more than £1 billion.

He also owns properties in India and a judge has ruled he has millions of pounds hidden in secret bank accounts and other assets. But he was granted taxpayers' money for his defence at a six-month trial because he had been sued by the banks he had cheated and was ruled bankrupt, despite still living in his London home.

In total he was given £5.17 million in legal aid. Just over £3 million was paid to his solicitors and £1.9 million to his barristers. They included Tory MP Geoffrey Cox QC. The rest was spent on other legal costs. The size of the handout prompted calls for reform from senior lawyers.

The Criminal Bar Association wants suspects' assets to be used to pay for their defence and its chairman Max Hill said scarce public money was being squandered.

"Too many wealthy people are receiving legal aid," he said. "If this man hadn't been declared bankrupt, he would still have received legal aid as his assets would have been under restraint and he would have been deemed to have no money - even though there were vast sums available. The Government cannot go on denying the truth that providing legal aid in these sort of cases is unnecessary and wrong."

At Westminster magistrates' court last month, Rastogi, 44, was jailed for seven years on top of his original nine-and-a-half year sentence, after he failed to pay a £20 million confiscation order.

He was put on The Sunday Times Rich List as one of Britain's wealthiest Asian businessmen after earning £4.1 million in five years from an "empire" of fictitious metal trading firms.

But in 2008 he was convicted of conspiracy to defraud at Southwark crown court, after the Serious Fraud Office found his network, RBG Resources, was a sham. The address of one supposed firm was a cowshed in India, and another was a US launderette.

He was jailed for nine-and-a-half years and given a £20 million confiscation order, which would be used to pay victims.

But he got a further seven years after Judge Michael Snow heard he had not handed over a penny. The judge said Rastogi had shown a "wilful" refusal to pay.

The Legal Services Commission said the case was "extraordinarily complex" and the legal aid bill would have been even higher if it had not been subject to special management.