How DID they let legal aid lawyer con us all out of £22million?

Fleets of luxury cars, exotic homes and the ultimately party lifestyle – all billing the taxpayer for thousands of fictitious claims: How disgraced lawyer at the centre the ‘biggest legal aid scam in UK history’ conned us all out of £22m

• Blavo & Co Solicitors amassed the enormous sum from bogus legal aid claims 
• John Blavo 57, has been ordered to pay back the money, the High Court ruled
• Only 1,000 of 9,000 cases per year Blavo & Co claimed it was handling were real

John Blavo, 57, lawyer whose law firm Blavo & Co made fraudulent claims on legal aid, amassing a staggering £22 million which Blavo must now pay back 

One thing was clearly visible through the smoked glass window of the sleek Mercedes coupe that glided out from behind the electronic gates of John Blavo’s Hertfordshire mansion this week: the driver’s middle finger.

Admittedly, the finger in question, pointed defiantly in our direction, did not actually belong to Blavo — the disgraced lawyer at the centre of what is thought to be the biggest legal aid scam in UK history.

It was brightly painted with silver nail varnish — the kind of garish accessory that is a trademark of his 26-year-old daughter Stephanie, who lives at the palatial family home with her parents and younger brother.

Miss Blavo used to drive a Barbie-pink Mercedes, and once turned up at Ascot in a lacy pink number with pom-poms and peroxide blonde hair. Was it her behind the Merc’s tinted windows? It certainly looked like her.

Either way, the hostile reaction was not entirely unexpected, given that her father — metaphorically speaking, at least — has been sticking a finger (indeed, two fingers) up at taxpayers for a very long time.

His firm, Blavo & Co Solicitors, amassed a staggering £22 million from bogus legal aid claims, as we now know from a damning High Court judgment.

The proceeds subsidised the Blavos’ extravagant lifestyle, which included the grand period house in St Albans, with indoor cinema and covered swimming pool in the grounds, a string of properties around the world, meals at Mayfair restaurants, lavish parties (at the Tower of London, City Hall and top hotels) and supercars on the drive: Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches, Maseratis, and, of course, the aforementioned Mercedes coupe.

Now Blavo, 57, has been ordered to pay back the millions his company milked from the system. He was the director and only shareholder, so was held solely accountable. Because there was evidence, the judge said, of an ‘attempt improperly to put property beyond the reach’ of the authorities — by transferring it to his wife — all Blavo’s assets in this country (‘exceeding £1,000 in value’) have been frozen. 

He is also facing a criminal investigation. Scotland Yard’s fraud team is investigating, but declined to comment. Still, he will hardly be left penniless.

Our own inquiries have established that among the family’s foreign portfolio is a luxury apartment in Puerto Banus near Marbella, the playground of the rich and famous, on Spain’s Costa del Sol. For the moment, the flat is not believed to be covered by the freezing order.

The property in Marbella linked to the Ghanian £22 Million legal aid fraudster John Blavo, who is facing a criminal investigation 

Neighbours said the family also have homes in Cyprus and Blavo’s native Ghana.

But this is not just a tale of greed and dishonesty. Perhaps the bigger scandal is the bureaucratic shambles which allowed Blavo to line his pockets so easily, at a time when the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) has been subject to stringent budgetary cutbacks.

It begs the question of whether this is just an isolated case.

One statistic, in particular, sums up the almost farcical lack of scrutiny: of the 9,000-odd cases a year that Blavo & Co claimed it was handling, only 1,000 turned out to be genuine.

It was not as if the scam was clever or sophisticated, either. Dates of court hearings were crudely invented, along with the names of judges and clients and other details.

Yet payment after payment was authorised, month after month, between April 2012 and March 2015 — even when the LAA had no record of proceedings taking place.

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Blavo & Co was ranked by the Ministry of Justice as the second highest-earning civil legal practice in England and Wales, before being dramatically shut down by the Solicitors Regulation Authority a little over three years ago.

Only now, though — in light of a ruling by Mr Justice Pepperall, hearing an application by the Lord Chancellor for the recovery of the public money — is the full story emerging.

Few in his profession could have ever suspected that, with more than 200 staff and 18 branches, and feted for excellence in the industry bible Legal 500, John Blavo’s legal empire was, in fact, a house of cards.

His fall has been spectacular.

Blavo, impeccably dressed in a pinstripe suit, epitomised the wealthy boss of a leading law firm.

He arrived each morning at the company’s head office, a handsome five-storey Georgian terrace in Central London, in a Bentley convertible.

Dressed to impress: John Blavo’s daughter Stephanie, 26, at Ascot 

His firm contributed generously to good causes.

Ghanaian-born Holby City star Hugh Quarshie, who has also appeared in Star Wars, was one of hundreds of guests at a glittering black-tie charity Christmas ball at the Tower of London a few years ago.

Blavo climbed up on stage to thunderous applause. ‘We want to do as much as we can by raising as much money as we can for people who are less fortunate than ourselves,’ he declared earnestly.

Great Ormond Street Hospital, the mental health charity Mind and an orphanage in Ghana all benefited from the largesse of Blavo & Co.

But it’s not hard to be philanthropic when the taxpayer is effectively writing the cheques.

Blavo & Co practised in clinical negligence, housing, immigration, family and criminal law, but it specialised in mental health law.

Both Blavo, who qualified as a solicitor in 1997, and his wife Lynne, 60, are former psychiatric nurses. Little is known about his background before he arrived in Britain around 30 years ago. On his marriage certificate, he is described as the son of a civil servant from Ghana.

His time as a nurse must surely have given him an inkling that mental health work was a potential gravy train.

Typically, lawyers in this field attend tribunals, conducted in private hospital rooms, to decide if patients should be discharged or continue treatment in the community rather than in a mental health unit. All solicitors on the Legal Aid Agency’s approved list have to do to get paid is make a monthly online claim. They do not have to produce any evidence that they did the work.

The risk of fraud is supposedly controlled because the fees in mental health cases are fixed — with a cap of £744 — whether hearings last an hour or a day. There are also contractual limits set on the number of new cases a firm can open each month, to keep costs down.

That’s the theory, anyway. How many cases did Blavo & Co take on during the three-year period under investigation? Answer: 24,658.

When questioned by LAA staff, the firm said it had acquired other practices and taken on their allocations of work. But, with one exception, no evidence was provided ‘as to the identity of these other firms’, the High Court heard.

One thing was clearly visible through the smoked glass window of the sleek Mercedes coupe that glided out from behind the electronic gates of John Blavo’s Hertfordshire mansion this week: the driver’s middle finger

However, nothing was done to begin with, so the money kept rolling in. Blavo & Co had a turnover of more than £11 million a year — £8 million of which came from public funds.

Before moving to their £3 million St Albans home, the family had lived in another large detached property in the area, where neighbours remember them as ‘friendly and polite’.

Neighbours at the new property, however, looked on in bewilderment as deliveries of luxury fixtures and fittings, such as Italian Murano glass chandeliers, arrived. ‘We saw evidence of enormous expenditure next door,’ said one resident.

Pressure of other work at the Legal Aid Agency meant a full compliance audit of Blavo & Co did not start until 2015, long after the company had aroused suspicion over the sheer volume of claims.

The fiasco was encapsulated by one patient the firm claimed to have represented in particular.

She was a woman whose life was said to have fallen apart when she started to go bald and fell ill with diabetes. There then followed a heartbreaking decline into mental illness which, according to her file, ended in an attempted suicide.

It was a tragic story — so tragic that staff at the LAA could not believe their eyes when they opened another file, this time for a ‘male patient’, and found the ‘female patient’s’ life story repeated nearly word for word.

Both were married in 1977, divorced in 1980, remarried in 1991, then separated in 1995. Both had gone bald at the same time, both took overdoses of the same three drugs on April 13, a year apart. Both had worked for the same number of years in the same job, and were seen by the same mental health professional. Indeed, there were more than 20 identical entries.

‘Endemic’ is how the judge described the culture of lies at Blavo & Co.

Then there was the ‘client’ said to have been treated at Edgware Community Hospital in London by a nurse called Akpabio Uwa and social worker Volker Hagedorn.

The client did not exist and the NHS trust had no record of a nurse or social worker by those names, although internet searches reveal a ‘Volker Hagedorn’ who is a German musician, writer and Bach expert.

Only 1,000 of 9,000 cases per year Blavo & Co claimed it was handling were real

In all, 101 NHS trusts were contacted to confirm records. Only two could. One trust said that, at the relevant time, it had no mental health facilities.

In another ludicrous example, investigators found that the mental health facility in question had closed (in 2008) and burnt down (in 2010), so was not operational at the time the tribunal supposedly took place.

The officials who checked this nonsense must have wondered if the person who put it on paper was a solicitor or a comedian.

The punchline was in the revelation that one of Blavo & Co’s ‘clients’ moved to St Albans in 1965, despite his date of birth being given as November 1967.

Lord Garnier QC, a former solicitor general, commented: ‘There can have been few, if any, more appalling cases of improper legal aid claims than this one.’

Might Blavo yet get the last laugh, or at least a snigger, though? There is still the apartment in Spain, after all. It is situated on the top floor of a block in a swish gated residential complex, set in landscaped gardens with a swimming pool. Records state the auction price of the flat — the value if there was a mortgage default — was €908,455 (£812,000).

The name on the deeds is Shipley Properties, set up on October 6, 2015, two months before Blavo’s assets in Britain were frozen. The sole shareholder and director is Blavo’s wife Lynne.

The freezing order, made in a judgment running to 6,000 words, said Blavo had failed to disclose his ownership of a Gateshead address in a list of 11 properties he had an interest in within the UK. Again, the property, in a row of Georgian townhouses near the Tyne Bridge, had been transferred to his wife.

In the words of the judge, this is ‘suggestive of an attempt to put the property beyond the reach of the applicant [the Lord Chancellor]’.

The Gateshead property was sold in 2017 for £54,000.

Until last year, Blavo’s daughter Stephanie was living in a mansion block with 24-hour porterage in London’s Baker Street, presumably purchased by her father.

John Blavo’s home on Cunningham Hill Road in St Albans. The grand period house has an indoor cinema and covered swimming pool in the grounds

Miss Blavo, who was educated at the £17,000-a-year Royal Masonic School for Girls in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, is the director of the company Kurangina Ltd, ‘an agent involved in the sale of a variety of goods’, which was only set up in February 2018. Another company she was a director of was voluntarily dissolved a few months later.

Predictably, perhaps, the Baker Street flat was sold earlier this month for £840,000.

During his once stellar career, John Blavo had another string to his bow. He represented footballers, including the former Arsenal star Lauren, and the retired Ghana international player John Paintsil.

Blavo was registered with the Football Association and blogged as The Football Lawyer for The Independent newspaper.

One of the most important things any footballer should learn, he wrote, was The Law Of One — ‘that you should only have one of every major possession, one big house, one big boat, one big car.

‘Some might think that is a little too frugal, but it can be a good rule of thumb to rein you back in at times of excess. Few other careers, if any, end so abruptly… with such a colossal drop-off in earnings.’

John Blavo should have taken his own advice. Even so, this scandal probably tells us more about the chaotic legal aid system than it does about him.

Additional reporting: Mark Branigan

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