Care home owner jailed after raid which led to woman, 81, starving to death

Mahendrasing Caussyram, 51, and his wife Saraspedy Caussyram, 54, who ran Carefirst 24, were found guilty
Tony Palmer/Square Mile News
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The owner of a care agency shut in a UK Border Agency immigration raid which led to an elderly woman starving to death has been jailed for three years.

Gloria Foster, 81, was left alone without food or water for nine days after Carefirst 24, the care company she was paying £2,000 a month to look after her, was shut down for using illegal workers.

Surrey County Council failed to provide alternative care for former Shell secretary Mrs Foster, and she was abandoned in her ground floor flat in Banstead, Surrey.

The pensioner suffered from high blood pressure, dementia and type 2 diabetes and had been receiving visits from Carefirst 24 four times-a-day to be cleaned, dressed and fed.

Following the care company’s closure, she was found suffering from dehydration, starvation and kidney failure, was covered in her own faeces and urine, and died 11 days later on February 2 2013 in Epsom Hospital.

Mahendrasing Caussyram, 51, and his wife Saraspedy Caussyram, 54, who ran Carefirst 24, were found guilty at Croydon Crown Court of facilitating breaches of immigration law.

Gloria Foster, 81, was left alone without food or water for nine days
Cascade News

A raid of one of the firm’s offices in Sutton in January 2013 found 12 of its 54 workers - mainly Filipino students - were in the country illegally.

None of them paid tax or National Insurance and some worked 24 hours a day for less than half of minimum wage.

As a result the company, which had lucrative contracts with a number of hospitals and local authorities in south London and Surrey, was closed.

Mr Caussyram, who was also convicted of breaching immigration law by engaging self-employed workers contrary to their visa restrictions, was jailed for three years last Friday and disqualified from being a company director for five years.

His wife received a twelve-month sentence, suspended for two years, with 150 hours community service.

Sentencing the pair, Judge Peter Gower QC said: “There is clear compelling evidence that CareFirst 24 was engaging migrant workers on a self-employed basis in breach of their visas and or after their visas had expired.

“Equally clear is that the directors of CareFirst 24 undertook an active role in the recruitment of such workers and in controlling the company’s position as regards the legality of their working on its behalf.”

After the sentencing, Mrs Foster’s family and friends said they were pleased that justice had been done.

Her friend, Vivien Saunders, 69, said the closure of the care home directly contributed to Mrs Foster’s death.

She told the Standard: “I definitely think the council should implement more thorough checks, they should be very clear on who they are using.

“If they did this in the first place then they wouldn’t have had to shut the home down straight away like this disaster.

“If they hadn’t employed illegal immigrants then this might not have happened.”

Her brother-in-law, Anthony De-Keyzer, 87, said he thought the judge had handed down fair sentences.

He added: “Obviously there was someone to blame, the firm clearly shouldn’t have employed people who weren’t allowed to be in or work in the country.”

In a damning inquest ruling in September 2014, Surrey coroner Richard Travers ruled Mrs Foster died of natural causes contributed to by neglect.

“The gross failure to provide Mrs Foster with the care she required during that period contributed to her death”, he said. “Absolutely nothing was done about providing Mrs Foster with alternative care.”

Speaking after the inquest verdict, a spokesman for the council said: “We would again like to say how sorry we are for our failure to help Gloria Foster get the support she needed.

“We should have done more and we completely accept that.

“While we have already made changes following this dreadful case, we’ll continue to do all we can to prevent anything like this happening again.”

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