The Daily Mail:
By Neil Sears
Last updated at 7:44 PM on 15th March 2011
Benefit cheat: Toorpakai Saiedi arriving at Isleworth Crown Court
A refugee from Afghanistan living in a £1.2million mansion paid for with a colossal £3,000 a week housing benefit faces jail after admitting benefit fraud.
Toorpakai Saiedi, 38, a mother of seven, shocked Britain when it emerged that New Labour rules allowed her to live in the luxury home at taxpayers’ expense.
One of her seven children even boasted that having the house paid for was like winning a lottery jackpot – and suggested it was ‘mad’ for the state to pay out so much.
The case caused such outrage that Conservative chancellor George Osborne has totally overhauled housing benefit laws as a result, affecting thousands of claimants. From next month the maximum payable is to be reduced to just £400 a week.
But Saiedi’s next accommodation at public expense could be in a prison following her guilty pleas to four counts of benefit fraud.
For despite being scarcely able to believe her luck at the mass of benefits that flowed her way after her family arrived in Britain, she was greedily building up savings and hiding a private income of £16,000 a year, and keeping them secret from the authorities.
Today she wore a blue veil and spoke through a Farsi interpreter to admit swindling the taxpayer out of £30,000 in housing benefit, working tax credit, and council tax credit, by not telling officials about her Barclays bank account.
Prosecutor Henrietta Paget told Isleworth crown court that by concealing the account Saiedi was able to collect illegally around £29,000 in benefits between August 2006 and September 2009 while living in her palatial home in Acton, west London.
At the time she was receiving benefits totalling £170,000 a year, including an astonishing £150,000 paid to a private landlord for the rent of the property – the equivalent to £12,500 a month.
Plush: The £1.2million home the family shared. Saiedi claimed asylum after coming to Britain in 2001 with her children, a year after her husband Haji Rahmat Shah Saiedi, 47, had arrived in London
The charges involve Saiedi not disclosing the bank account to Ealing council officials when claiming for council housing benefit and council tax benefit, and similar deception when claiming tax credit from the Department of Work and Pensions.
Judge Jonathan Lowen warned she may face imprisonment as he ordered a pre-sentence report and, without any irony, demanded she must not move from her luxury mansion without informing the court.
Judge Lowen said: ‘I am asking for a pre-sentence report. It is not intended to limit any sentencing. All options remain open including custody.
Delight: Son Jawad Saiedi who idled away his days playing snooker and driving around in cars
‘You have been granted bail on the condition that you do not move from your current address without informing the court and that you must co-operate in the preparation of the report.’
Saiedi claimed asylum after coming to Britain in 2001 with her children, a year after her husband Haji Rahmat Shah Saiedi, 47, had arrived in London.
The family, who were granted leave to remain, said they were wealthy farmers near Bagram airbase, 20 miles from the Afghan capital Kabul, but claimed they were forced to flee because of Taliban threats.
They then lived in a series of ever larger properties, all paid for by local authorities – first in a three-bedroom terrace house in Enfield, north London, and then in a five-bedroom semi in Ealing, before moving into their controversial seven-bedroom palace.
But three years ago the huge cost of their imposing state-funded home became public, attracting a storm of headlines and criticism.
When the family invited a newspaper through their front door, they revealed a haul of expensive games consoles, including a £160 Nintendo Wii and £250 Playstation 3, top of the range mobile phones and two laptop computers, worth around £350 each.
And on top of the seven bedrooms, the house boasts two large reception rooms, one featuring an enormous plasma TV, two kitchens, a dining room, a breakfast room, three shower rooms and a 100ft garden.
Saiedi’s son Jawad, a student who said he idled his days away driving around in cars and playing snooker, said at the time: ‘When the council chose to put us here we did not say no.
‘If someone gave you a lottery jackpot, would you leave it? When I heard how much the council was paying, I thought they were mad.’
The family’s private landlord, Ajit Panesar, who bought the house in March 2008 for £1.2million, has said of the rent he receives: ‘I have done nothing wrong. I can’t help it if the law says I should get paid the amount of money.’
Saiedi was freed on bail until she is sentenced at the same court next month.
Welfare Queen..
Isn’t she the one who once complained that her welfare allowance wasn’t enough for regular trips to Eurodisney with her unemployed kids???
When Muslims immigrate to countries where they can receive benefits, they will do so, regardless of the expense to the tax payers. Its part of the strategy that Islam’s leaders have to drain the west and the free world of monetary resources, one immigrant at a time.
Its time the UK and the west stop accepting Muslims from any country and for any reason. They have done enough damage to the world through their bigotry, hatred and terrorism against all that opposes Islamic dominance.
Time for the west, through groups like the EDL , to put a total stop to the hajri and repair what damage Muslims have done to Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and especially the Middle East.
History has proven that, where Muslims go, there also goes hate and destruction.
Only Western Governments are stupid enough to give free money and housing to phony refugees. No wonder the riff-raff keeps pouring in!
End the racket and shut the borders. Nobody gets in unless he/she is self-supporting. No more support of any kind for Third-World Frauds !
Ron wrote: History has proven that, where Muslims go, there also goes hate and destruction.
Its been known for a long time.
John Wesley had this to say of Islam
Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it…have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind.
The Doctrine of Original Sin, Works (1841), ix. 205.
or
“I studied the Kuran a great deal … I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammed. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world, and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion infinitely more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.”
-Alexis de Tocqueville
or
Victor Hugo, in “Les Orientales”, writes: “The Turks came this way. Everything is ruin and mourning.