A self-styled “knight” who pocketed £1.8 million in disability benefits while performing beachball tricks in a holiday pool has been ordered to pay back £270,000.
Barry Brooks, 50, who insists on being called “Sir Barry”, was jailed for eight years last August for claiming he was disabled and so weak he could not pick up a telephone. In reality the fraudster drove a string of prestige cars, ran his own motorcycle shop, and performed beachball tricks for pals.
He was filmed serving meals in a pub, carrying plumbing equipment and “dive bombing” into a swimming pool during a holiday in the south of France in 2008 while scrounging off the state.
Brooks claimed up to £29,000 a month under the Government’s Access to Work Scheme. With two co-fraudsters, he pocketed £1.88 million by submitting bogus claims for travel, support staff, and office equipment, for themselves and for disabled employees at the bogus firm they ran called Access Audit Corporation.
Claims were even submitted for daily taxi fares in Brooks’s name while he was holidaying in Thailand and Gran Canaria.
At a hearing into the profits of the scam, Brooks tried to claim a Rolls-Royce and a Jaguar bearing the personalised numberplate BAZ belonged to his father John and could not be seized as a proceed of crime.
He also tried to claim four houses registered in his name belonged to relatives. But Brooks refused to attend Southwark crown court to back up his arguments, and Judge Martin Beddoe ordered him to repay £268,910 or face a further three years in prison.
The judge said:“The Jaguar and Rolls-Royce were used by the defendant on foreign trips, and there was evidence to suggest he arranged the finance for the purchase.
“Brooks has declined to appear today and put forward no evidence to support these claims.”
