A nest of crooks

A solicitor who treated the legal aid scheme as a “licence to print money”, has been jailed for five years. Alan Pritchard, who had offices in Birmingham and Wolverhampton, conspired with two colleagues to generate false claims worth UK£2.25 million between 1993 and 1994. The prosecution said that the three men had persuaded naïve members of the public from deprived areas of the country to sign blank forms, sometimes more than one each, which they subsequently completed with bogus records of work done. The court heard that investigators had been unable to trace much of the UK£1.1 million that Pritchard earned from the fraud. Judge Derek Stanley described Pritchard, Peter Lane, a legal consultant, and Brian O’Connor, office manager, as a “little nest of crooks” who had set up a “mass production line” of bogus claims.