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Gypsies’ gaudy mansions built in Romania… with OUR money
By The Salfordian, on May 21st, 2011
More waste and lets make no mistake about this the Lib-Lab-Con have set this up and allowing it to continue.
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In the week a gang of Romanian gypsies was jailed for an £800,000 benefits fraud, Sue Reid reveals the loophole in British law that allows taxpayers’ money to be funnelled into a gaudy mansion and BMWs back in the East.
On a windy street corner in Bradford, West Yorkshire, a woman wears a lacy black headscarf and touts copies of The Big Issue, the magazine sold by the homeless.
She has travelled 40 miles across the Pennines from Manchester, where she lives with her eight children, to sell as many copies as possible at £2 each.
Luxury: The impressive property in Tandarei, Romania, identified by police as being built for a Gypsy gang linked with a £800,000 UK benefits scam. Jailed fraudster Adrian Radu lived there
But all is not as it seems. For 32-year-old Contessa Calinescu is a Romanian gypsy and is not homeless. In fact, she was driven to Bradford from Manchester, where the rent on her home is paid by taxpayers via welfare payments. She also claims nearly £500 a month in benefits for her large brood of children.
Like hundreds of other Roma women, she is exploiting a loophole in the law, in order to claim huge amounts of benefits.
Romanians who have migrated to Britain are restricted from claiming benefits — unlike other East European nations which joined the EU three years earlier.
But in a sophisticated scam, many Romanians have circumvented the system by claiming to be ‘self-employed’ Big Issue sellers — a status which entitles them to a National Insurance number and to claim the full panoply of welfare benefits, such as rent payments, council tax rebates and child benefits.
According to the Department of Work and Pensions’ website, Romanians working ‘in a self-employed capacity’ can claim housing and council tax benefit and child benefits.
As a result, Romanians are gleefully exploiting our generosity. A migrant advice organisation states: ‘The easiest way for Romanians to get access to the benefits system is to become self-employed.’
The result is that Romanian gypsies see Britain as the perfect destination as they try to escape poverty and discrimination in their home country.
They are doing nothing illegal. Even those who sell only a few copies of The Big Issue are entitled to tap into welfare benefits, and scores of them rake in huge amounts of state aid which they send back to Romania.
As a result, one particular town, Tandarei, has been transformed from a dusty outpost 100 miles from the capital Bucharest to a prosperous community full of new houses, BMWs and Land Rovers.
Indeed, some of the homes (painted garish colours and looking somewhat incongruous in a part of the world where farmers still use horse-drawn carts) are so swish that they have been likened to Beverly Hills.
Scotland Yard believes that more than 100 of the homes in an area dubbed ‘Benefits Boulevard’ have been built with the proceeds of money earned either illegally or through welfare scams in Britain.
This week, the scale of the problem was exposed when a gang of Romanian gypsies — some of whom own a brand new house in Tandarei — was jailed after fraudulently obtaining more than £800,000 in a sophisticated scam which a judge at Southwark Crown Court described as a ‘flagrant’ attack on our benefits system.
Gang members made regular budget flights to Britain, where they used forged Home Office residency documents and fake job references to obtain National Insurance numbers, and enabling them to claim tax credits, income support, child benefits and housing handouts.
Plush: A similar property in Tandarei, Romania, where Marian Radu lived. Benefits are funnelled back to Romania through a loophole that allows gangs to buy stunning homes
They also used bogus birth certificates and photos of children who either did not exist or were victims of child-trafficking to illegally rake in child benefit.
Much of the money was funnelled back to Tandarei, where many more £500,000 houses are under construction. British-registered vehicles are everywhere.
Four mansions, in a property portfolio worth nearly £2?million, are believed to belong to the Radu family, who were jailed at Southwark Crown Court this week. It will now be some time before they are released and are able to return to the salmon pink-painted three and four-storey villas, with their manicured lawns, balconies and a porch.
Although this gang was not involved in the Big Issue scam, the case demonstrates how Romanian migrants are using a variety of tricks to abuse the system.
The Big Issue is sold by an estimated 3,000 people in Britain, with 40?per cent of sellers in the North believed to be Romanian gypsies.
Meanwhile, genuinely homeless Britons are finding it increasingly hard to sell the magazine, which was first published to help the homeless get a meagre weekly income and the chance to better their lives.
The system works by people buying copies for £1 each to sell at £2, and keeping the profit. But while British-born poor often can only afford to buy a few copies at a time, Romanian gangsters ‘block buy’ copies for cash at Big Issue distribution depots.
These are then handed to Roma to sell on streets all over Britain, with the profits being returned to the gangmasters.
Every morning, Roma women are driven to town centres across the country — from Keswick in Cumbria to Bath in Somerset. One thousand magazines bought at £1 each and sold for £2 means £1,000 in profit every day can go to their ‘handlers’.
The money is then passed to the Mr Bigs, who wire or take it back personally to Romania.
As for the Roma who sell the magazine, by declaring themselves to be ‘self-employed’, they are entitled to welfare payments.
According to Simon Ashley, a councillor in Manchester, which has a 2,000-strong Roma community: ‘These people aren’t homeless — they live in houses. But the legal loophole allows them to have access to benefits as well as selling copies of Big Issue. Some get £21,000 a year in benefits, which is more than the average wage of a real worker.’
One criminal case that exposed the scandal involved a woman working for a Roma charity in London who set up a consultancy to help newly-arrived gypsies become Big Issue sellers. A police investigation led to Lavinia Olmazu being jailed for assisting 172 Roma to fraudulently claim a total of £2.9??million in benefits.
Her scam was simple. For an £80 fee, she provided fake ‘letters of recommendation’ to the Government’s Revenue & Customs offices declaring that the Big Issue sellers ran their own businesses and were, therefore, self-employed and able to obtain national insurance numbers.
Meanwhile, in Slough, newly-arrived Roma migrants have become Big Issue sellers and then registered as self-employed to get benefits.
A 22-year-old called Silvo said: ‘I can call on 100 of my friends and family living nearby to sell the Big Issue. We are very busy on the weekends.
‘We get money to pay our rents from the council because our business is now “selling”. We send money back to Tandarei, our town in Romania.’
Roma sellers of The Big Issue can be spotted every day in Leeds, Birmingham, Oxford, London and Bristol, and smaller towns in the North and the Home Counties. Many do not speak English, even though this is supposed to be a prerequisite of being a Big Issue vendor.
Imposing: Another luxury gypsy home in Tandarei, Romania, that police discovered when the benefits fraud ring was smashed
Back in Bradford, mother-of-eight Contessa says: ‘I came to your country four years ago to find work. I get by selling the Big Issue and I receive benefits to care for my children. My friend has the car and brings me over from Manchester for the selling every week.’
In London, Lina Petrea, 43, has been a Big Issue seller for a year. Her pitch is outside the Holland & Barrett store in Upper Street, Islington. She says she lives in North London with seven other Romanians, five of whom sell The Big Issue.
‘By selling Big Issue, I get a National Insurance registration as self-employed. When you don’t speak good in your language, all you can do is sell The Big Issue.’
In nearby Holborn, 30-year-old Marinella has been selling The Big Issue for eight months. Every day, the mother-of-two gets the bus from Ilford, Essex, to her pitch. ‘The Big Issue helps me feed my daughters,’ she says. ‘But there are too many Romanians selling the magazine now. The competition makes it difficult for all of us to make money.’
The Big Issue organisation sees nothing wrong with the Roma sellers becoming self-employed to get state assistance. Elizabeth Price, director of Big Issue in the North, says: ‘We understand that these benefits are seen by some as a loophole, but the fact is, as Big Issue vendors, these people are permitted to be self-employed and so are entitled to those payments.’
However, British-born homeless are losing out. Gary Johnson, 39, originally from Liverpool, is a Big Issue seller in Birmingham city centre. He says: ‘These Romanians buy up loads of magazines in one go. It is far more than I could afford, and it means there are not any left for the truly homeless.
‘It looks like big business to me. They don’t need the money and they’re not homeless. They are given accommodation far more easily than most people because they have lots of children.’
In Oxford, a Big Issue seller called Jim said that every Monday he watches two Romanian businessmen buy between 800 and 1,000 copies of the magazine at a nearby depot.
‘Romanian businessmen are making a huge profit from getting their women to sell the Big Issue magazine. Two men I know spend a grand a week, but will make double that when women from their community sell them on to the public for £2.’
Although a spokesman for Big Issue says the organisation is aware of the issue, it is ironic that the magazine’s founder, John Bird, has declared war on welfare cheats, asking the Government to tighten the system.
‘It makes me laugh how some people on benefits seem to know every single one of their rights — but none of their responsibilities,’ he has said.
Such a view perfectly describes the Roma gypsy people who blatantly use his magazine to milk our welfare state, deprive the real homeless and have spawned a huge criminal industry.