Housing benefit assessors ‘invented fake claimants to steal £1m from taxpayers in decade-long scam’

Menelik Cowan, 37, and six other council workers allegedly paid the cash into bank accounts opened with false passports.

Cowan, his then-girlfriend Natasha Francis, 38, his brother Hugh Small, 39, Cassandra Johnson, 37, Jessica Bartley, 35, Rahel Asfaha, 36, and Alexander Williams, 39, were working for the local authorities at the time.

Gareth Munday, prosecuting, said the assessors put through a vast number of false claims using fake identities.

He described the scam as a ‘fraudulent business on a grand scale and against the public purse, in particular against local housing benefits offices’.

‘When I say it is a business, that is exactly what this was. This was an organised crime conducted in a businesslike fashion.’

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