How did the City slicker dodge train fares for six years and did one of his fellow commuters shop him?

He’s the City slicker whose dramatic fare swindle has gripped the capital.  But how did he do it and did one of his fellow passengers shop him? Joshi Herrmann takes the train to Stonegate
End of the line: hedge-fund manager Jonathan Burrows, who earned £1 million a year but dodged a £21.50 daily fare
Jamie Wiseman for The Daily Mail
Joshi Herrmann3 December 2015

The weary suits sitting around me on the 17.02 service from Cannon Street to Hastings have had a load lifted from their shoulders this week.

Since it was reported in April that an unnamed hedge-fund manager commuting from Stonegate, East Sussex, had racked up £43,000 in dodged fares, a cloud of suspicion hung over anyone travelling on this line — with fingers pointed at each other across the aisles like the final scene of a Poirot.

“A chap I know because his daughter is schoolfriends with my daughter gets off at Stonegate, and because he dresses like someone who works in the City, people thought he was the man,” says one of the passengers sitting in the first carriage. “He had journalists hounding him for days.”

Last weekend the name of the dodger finally emerged: Jonathan Burrows, a 44-year-old investment executive at asset-management giant BlackRock. He had hoped to remain anonymous by settling the huge bill within days of being caught but that unravelled when the British Transport Police decided to launch its own investigation and City watchdog the Financial Conduct Authority got involved too. Burrows left his job last week and the FCA’s reported interest in the case may prevent him from working in the City again. And now it transpires that it was a fellow passenger who may have shopped Burrows (apparently disgruntled by the original outcome), prompting a new investigation by the transport police.

“You won’t find him in here any more,” says one of the 17.02 passengers triumphantly when I ask about Burrows. A spokesman for BlackRock confirms that Burrows stopped working for the company last week, adding: “What he’s alleged to have done is totally contrary to our values and principles.”

Burrows had spent nearly 20 years at the firm since graduating from Manchester in law studies. He was a high-flyer who earned as much as £1 million a year, and the company created a new position of “UK portfolio solutions” for him in 2010. He once gave a PowerPoint presentation, available online, entitled “The fallout from too big to fail…” One of the points on the first page says: “This is not about investor self-interest!”

After confused reports, the Standard has looked into how Burrows pulled off his audacious swindle. He seems to have been boarding the train at Stonegate ticketless, because the station doesn’t have ticket barriers. A standard single fare for the journey into London — which takes just over an hour — costs £21.50 and an annual season ticket £4,500. A spokesman for Southeastern says there are regular ticket checks during the journey. “The honest answer is that we don’t know how he avoided detection by our staff — he was obviously very clever about how he did it,” they told the Standard.

Then, when he got to London he appears to have used his Oyster card to swipe out, meaning he was charged the £7.20 penalty fare that is levied when users exit using an Oyster without having swiped in anywhere. “We think there was an interchange going on at London Bridge,” says the spokesman, suggesting that — perhaps because of timings — he didn’t use the service that goes straight to Cannon Street and instead rode the Charing Cross-bound train to London Bridge, where he switched to another platform for the over-the-river leg.

What is clear is that in late November 2013 a revenue protection officer at London Bridge (it is thought Burrows might have been on his way to a meeting south of the river) noticed him tapping out and being charged the £7.20 penalty fare and stopped him, prompting an investigation that showed he had stopped buying a Stonegate-Cannon Street season ticket in November 2008. When in March Burrows’s lawyer told Southeastern he wanted to settle the issue out of court, the rail company told him the fares due amounted to £43,000 and he settled the debt three days later.

Southeastern says it “takes the issue of fare evasion very seriously” and when the Standard pushed on the precise mechanics of Burrows’s dodge, it said: “If this is going on, we obviously don’t want to inform other passengers about how to do it.”

Back to the 17.02 train, when I mention why I’ve joined their carriage, a tall, besuited passenger waves his season ticket at me to indicate that he’s paid for his journey. The fare-dodger has been the only topic of conversation among commuters on this line. In the mornings, everyone on board when the train pulled in at Stonegate is said to have peered out at the platform like crime victims surveying an identity parade. Under particular scrutiny were middle-aged men in suits.

“Because he is unnamed, all the no-doubt numerous, blameless hedge-fund managers who commute from Stonegate are being made to feel awkward,” wrote Margaret Thatcher’s biographer, the former newspaper editor Charles Moore, who lives locally. “Gossip keeps identifying suspects (‘Can’t be anyone from the village: must be someone from the Heathfield direction.’ ‘What about X? Oh no, can’t be him: he always goes by helicopter.’)”

And the columnist Dominic Lawson, who catches the train from Stonegate only once a week, has written: “Those of us who use the station for our travel to London dressed in a business suit are now stared at with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion by the other passengers.” Lawson said this week that he has never spotted Burrows and doesn’t know the latest —“I’m not up with the gossip.”

Local celebrities, such as the actor Robert Bathurst, he of Downton Abbey fame, were recognisable enough to avoid suspicion.

The truth is that Burrows wasn’t just defrauding the Southeastern rail company — he was sabotaging the rural aspirations of everyone sitting around him. They settled for this twice-daily journey in return for the neighbourliness of the countryside, where people know each other’s names and how one another’s children are doing at school.

“He was highly respected within the community because, when he arrived three years ago, he made a real effort to go around all the locals and make himself known,” says a neighbour of Burrows. If he’d been a cheeky kid conning the barriers with a faulty Oyster card at East Croydon, that would be one thing — city life dictates that you do whatever you can get away with. But to dodge one’s responsibilities in a place such as the civil parish of Ticehurst, East Sussex, is really not on.

In all likelihood, one of the people sitting around me — or perhaps they’re on one of the later trains — shopped Burrows. A spokesman for the British Transport Police says it only started investigating the case because a fellow passenger made an allegation. He said it would normally be a matter between the individual and the rail firm.

According to a City source who spoke to the Daily Mail, Burrows told his bosses last week that “the FCA might give you a call”, before resigning without a payoff when asked to explain his fare-dodging. The FCA says it can’t confirm or deny whether it is investigating Burrows but a spokesman said that, hypothetically, a crime such as not paying for train fares could “speak to the character” of an individual, pricking its interest. When deciding whether someone was fit and proper to operate in finance, the FCA said: “One of the matters is whether the person has been the subject of any adverse finding or any settlement in civil proceedings, particularly in connection with investment or other financial business, misconduct, [or] fraud.” One of the passengers says he can understand that “if this guy is handling other people’s money and he’s committed what is basically a fraud, you can see why that’s a bit of a problem”.

And so ends the episode that some on this line were calling “the great train robbery”. Wrongly accused businessmen are once again able to relax with their heads in the Standard crossword page, reputations restored.

Following publication of this article, solicitors representing Jonathan Burrows have contacted us to say that, while £43,000 was paid by their client to SouthEastern Railway to settle the matter out of court, the sum did not reflect the value of the unpaid fares alone. Mr Burrows said in December 2014: ‘I have always recognised that what I did was foolish. I have apologised to all concerned and reiterate that apology publicly today. The settlement I made with Southeastern in March 2014 was for an amount significantly in excess of the value of the fares not paid by me on the small number of occasions that I failed to pay. Indeed the size of the settlement could be said to have led to a distorted perception of the scale of my wrong-doing. However, that does not change the fact that what I did was wrong, and I accept that.’ – This note added 2/12/15

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