British Pakistani Muslims: The Takeaway Truth

It was a curry that opened my eyes to mortgage fraud in the Pakistani Muslim community. Before I founded my own business I spent most evenings working on motorcycles. I rode my first bike off-road at age 7, on-road at 17. Originally doing my own servicing out of economic necessity, by my late teens I had a nice little side-hustle servicing the bikes local miners used for their daily commute. Often after work I’d go straight in the garage, nipping out late to a local takeaway for a curry to eat with a bottle of wine before bed. As a regular customer I was soon friendly and on first name terms with the shop’s operators, all young British Pakistani Muslims. After 9/11 they explained to me how the Al Qaeda attack that massacred 2958 innocent people was a false-flag operation by the CIA and Mossad. I nodded, smiled, and said nothing. It’s pointless arguing with nonsense and it’s a bad idea to upset anyone who prepares your food. I told myself that they were young and would grow out of it. Living in the echo chamber that is the Batley and Dewsbury area, their take on 9/11 was familiar. I’d heard it from colleagues at the Huddersfield firm where I’d worked previously. On 9/11 itself and over the days afterwards I’d made a point of telling Pakistani Muslim friends and colleagues, “Nobody is blaming you. We know it’s Bin Laden who did the truck bomb before. We’re your mates.” And it was true; we were their mates. None of us blamed them or any other British Pakistani Muslims for Al Qaeda. We didn’t know that the 7/7 bombings, which would be perpetrated by British Muslims just down the road from our office, were less than four years away.

In July 2004 I rode a 1982 Suzuki, GS850GX, I’d bought in January 1989. It had developed a misfire though, so I’d benched it awaiting ignition parts. Then my employer made me redundant. Fine, it was a rotten job and I knew it was coming, so had incorporated my business a month earlier. I had been planning to launch that September, but figured it was fate and hit the ground running. Often working 18-20 hours a day, it was 2010 before I had time to ride again, as long evenings in the garage gave way to long evenings driving out to see prospective clients as far away as Liverpool, Newcastle, Leicester, and Hull. Running out of the attic of our home near Leeds, I visited clients at their homes in the evenings, and as eating causes drowsiness, which can be every bit as dangerous as drinking and driving, I’d eat late. Midnight pizza and curry bought on my way home became the norm. Back to the takeaway.

The lads behind the counter had only ever seen me in greasy overalls, so when I walked in one night wearing a suit and tie the guy serving did a double-take. “What is it you do Neil?” he asked. I explained my business, life assurance, pensions, investments, and mortgages. Mortgages! I’d said a magic word. “I thought you were a mechanic,” he said. Two of his colleagues joined him at the counter. Without further ado, with no discretion nor shame, they started to badger me. “Our mates in Batley and Dewsbury all do mortgage fraud. They’ve got accountants and solicitors who do it with them. Can you do it with us?” As with their 9/11 conspiracy theories, I laughed it off. I told them that we couldn’t help them with any kind of fraud. All this was happening with other customers in earshot, a fact which caused them no concern at all. It was obviously normal for them, nothing to feel ashamed about.

Shortly after that I joined the Yorkshire & Humber Fraud Forum, the YHFF. Led by the Leeds branches of the UK’s largest and most prestigious accountancy firms, until it folded last year, the YHFF laid on presentations by eminent law enforcers, lawyers, forensic accountants, and even former fraudsters who’d done time and were going straight, à la Frank Abagnale. At my first YHFF meeting I met a lady I’d not seen since I’d left Brigshaw Comprehensive 25 years before. My former classmate was head of security at one of the larger building societies. I told her of my takeaway experience. She was anything but shocked. “That sounds about right,” she replied. “We have a massive problem with mortgage fraud around Batley and Dewsbury, and so does everyone else. They’re all Pakistanis, but we can’t say that.’

By early 2007 we had a proper office. Moving out of our attic, we’d taken 450 square feet of a former barbershop. Located over a shop selling sewing machines, Canary Wharfe it wasn’t, but ever one to turn a negative into a positive, I coined the slogan “We’re above the sewing machine shop, but we won’t stitch you up.” The staff was me, my wife, a mortgage consultant, and an administrator. I’d given up on the takeaway I’d originally frequented. They’d continually hassled me to do mortgage fraud, and eventually got stroppy and surly at my stonewalling. Having switched my custom to another nearby takeaway, again I’d become friendly with the operators, two young guys in their twenties and their uncle who looked to be in his mid-fifties. One night they asked if we could get their uncle a mortgage? I said I’d put my mortgage guy on it. When I briefed him though, he wasn’t happy. He didn’t like dealing with Pakistanis, he said, because, in his words, “They lie about everything, they muck you about, it gets me a bad reputation with lenders if the information on the mortgage application turns out to be a load of crap, which it always does, and even if I get them the mortgage I’ll never get the arrangement fee because they never pay.”  He was an experienced consultant, a good guy. I’d heard other mortgage brokers say the same. I also knew tradesmen who, having had problems getting paid, would not do work for Pakistanis. I’d been a victim myself when working for a previous employer; one cancelled a cheque and almost got me fired. I once had a very frank conversation about this problem with a Pakistani friend. “We pay if we’re buying from other Pakistanis,” he explained, “but we don’t like money going out of the community.”

His lack of enthusiasm put me in a bind. I liked the guys in the shop, I considered them friends, and my entire personal political ideology was based on treating everyone the same regardless of nationality, ancestry, creed, colour, sex, sexuality, whatever. In 2007 at age 44 I was a 29-year member of the Labour Party, which I’d joined aged 14 in 1978. I’d joined the Anti-Nazi league the year before, 1977, had been on the miners’ picket lines with my dad in 1972 and 1974, and in 1977 was on the Grunwick picket supporting the Asian women who were in dispute with Grunwick boss George Ward. Travelling down on a bus with the SWP from Leeds, I was there the day the police arrested Shirley Williams. I was an idealist. I would not refuse anybody service. So, I decided I’d do all the legwork, do the factfind, get the necessary documentation to satisfy the requirements of the anti-money laundering regulations, and then give it to my consultant. If we could do it, great, he’d earn the fee, but if we couldn’t, at least we’d have done the right thing. I’d take the hit instead of wasting his time. No big deal. Thus, it transpired that at 5pm one Saturday evening I was in a takeaway doing a factfind. Claiming their uncle spoke no English, the lads did all the talking. Their story was that their uncle, a man I saw working in the shop seven nights a week, could not speak English, was unable to work, lived on benefits, and had no other income. His wife earned £5200pa as a garment worker, conveniently just less than the personal allowance so she paid no Income Tax or National Insurance Contributions either. The mortgage he wanted was for a buy-to-let. He owned his own main residence, and two other buy-to-lets, but he let them for free to ‘friends,’ supposedly. In other words, the tenants paid the rent in cash, and he was paying no income tax on it.

The whole episode was a farce. I’d ask a question, they’d speak to each other in their own tongue, then give me an answer. Sometimes though they’d forget and lapse into English with phrases like “No don’t tell him…” before realising that they were about to let slip an inconvenient truth. Whatever, I faithfully did the job. At the end of it I told them the truth that their uncle failed all the affordability criteria, and we could not get him a mortgage. He was also obviously committing benefit and tax fraud, activities which advisers must report, but I didn’t tell them that. Returning to the office, I called my mortgage consultant. I owed him the chance to say, “I told you so.” 

It’s not just mortgage fraud, of course. A former Pakistani colleague working as a compliance officer at another firm applied for a job with us. I’d liked him when we’d worked together and was keen to hire him. Then, during our discussions, he confessed that he was running a crash-for-cash insurance fraud in Bradford with a friend and a doctor who signed off their ‘victims’ non-existent injuries. Another Pakistani job applicant, a former Lloyds Bank employee who’d resigned under investigation for deliberate mis-selling and impersonating a client on a phone call, boasted that he’d be able to generate loads of business because he’d stolen millions of clients’ data from Lloyds. We reported it, but he’s still practicing. Would-be clients are the same. British Pakistani Muslims have tried to suborn me into facilitating underwriting and home insurance frauds on innumerable occasions. A typical question is “If I do Critical Illness Cover, how long do I need to wait before I claim so they won’t check back on my medical history?” Their intention, of course, is fraudulent non-disclosure. With home insurance, they typically try to insure rental properties as if they were their own main residence.

A week after my abortive mortgage factfinding visit I was back in that shop for a sequel that presaged the rape gang horrors to come.

Neil F. Liversidge is an Independent Financial Adviser running his own firm in Castleford, West Riding Personal Financial Solutions Ltd, www.wrpfs.com. For 39 years until 2017 he was a member of the Labour Party. A Brexiteer, he voted Conservative in 2019 and is now a member of Reform UK, the New Culture Forum, and the Free Speech Union.

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