Five mortgage brokers struck off after frauds

The FSA has banned five mortgage intermediaries and fined one of them £104,000.

This brings the total number of mortgage intermediaries banned since December 2006 to 101.

Most of the individuals have been banned because they are not fit and proper to work in regulated financial services through failings that led to mortgage fraud.

Mark Thorogood, trading as Property Park Mortgages, Colwyn Bay, North Wales, and Darren Button, formerly of the same firm, are among those to be banned.

Thorogood, the owner of Property Park Mortgages, has also been fined £104,294.

The FSA found that Thorogood had knowingly submitted fraudulent mortgage applications for himself and his wife, inflating his income from £22,950 to £120,000 and her income from £8,832 to £95,000. 

In addition, Thorogood submitted two mortgage applications containing fraudulent information on behalf of a family member. In the first application he stated the family member’s income was £85,000 and in the second he stated that it was £130,000; the actual income was £17,610.

Darren Button deliberately entered false income and employment information in mortgage applications which he submitted to lenders.

Button also attempted to conceal a customer’s true income on a payslip with correction fluid because he knew the lender would reject the application if they saw the genuine income.

Button was also aware of other fraudulent applications but took no action to prevent this as he thought “it didn’t seem to be a huge problem”.

Daniel Djaba, trading as DPD Consultancy Services, London, and Adeolu Adeosun, who worked for the same firm, have also been banned.

Djaba failed to have appropriate systems and controls in place at DPD, and therefore failed to prevent the firm being used to commit mortgage fraud.

Specifically, Djaba failed to ensure that one of his advisers was properly monitored, effectively allowing the advisor to submit an inaccurate mortgage application for himself.

Adeosun, a former adviser at DPD, knowingly submitted fraudulent mortgage applications for himself and intentionally misled the FSA during an interview.

Adeosun was a self-employed adviser who provided mortgage advice to DPD’s customers. However, he was not qualified to give advice, nor had he been assessed to be a competent adviser by DPD.

In a residential mortgage application for himself in April 2008, Adeosun inflated his income for 2006 by more than eight times from £7,826 to £66,022. In a buy-to-let application for himself in 2007 Adeosun again misleadingly used gross income figures rather than net.

In another case, Waheed Hanif, trading as The Broker Group, Burton upon Trent, has been banned for acting dishonestly and lacking integrity.

In November 2009 Hanif was convicted by Stafford Crown Court of one count of obtaining a pecuniary advantage for another by deception and one count of obtaining a money transfer by deception. Hanif had submitted false information in his application for FSA authorisation and a false mortgage application to a lender in his own name.