Fake contessa

Fake contessa of Dulwich is jailed

A woman who claimed to be a contessa and the heir to a fortune amounting to “300 followed by 41 zeros”^[1] was jailed for five years today. Elda Beguina collected £2.3 million from unsuspecting “supporters” after telling them tales of wealth from sunken Spanish galleons and treasure hidden in the Philippines.

The 63 year-old mother of two would offer the victims jobs in her “global humanitarian organisation”. But before the deal was signed, she asked them for a loan of a few thousand pounds, saying her fortune had been held up overseas.

Calling herself Baroness Beguina and the Contessa de Avila, she would talk of a home in The Bishop’s Avenue, Hampstead, and buying Harrods for £15 billion, and surrounded herself with servants. But Beguina had paid for her title and lived in a semi-detached Dulwich home.

She would also mention her links to the Hapsburg and Bourbon dynasties and pretended she was set to buy the Russian embassy in Kensington.

Today at Southwark crown court she was convicted of seven counts of deception and a further charge of attempted deception between February and July 2004.

In 1997 she was jailed for two years for an extraordinary attempt to defraud financial institutions of £16 trillion. [Evening Standard, 3 July]

^[1] 30 septillion, it says here.

Misprints of mine that I caught before they actually got published #3,010 (Scotland special)

Baroness Andrews: We have ways and means of meeting neds.

N in the W

The Housing and Regeneration Bill. Nothing too exciting, nothing very contentious.

Lord Dixon-Smith (Con): The Homes and Communities Agency is not a body to which we object in principle, but it is an amalgamation of three pre-existing bodies, including the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships. Of course, the nigger in the woodpile, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has already pointed out, is that it still incorporates what I call the hangover of the new towns legislation. If it were not for that, we would have little difficulty with the foundation of this agency. [Hansard]

Wait, what?

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con): My Lords, before my noble friend sits down, earlier in his speech he used a phrase about a woodpile. If your Lordships’ House were happy, it would perhaps be helpful if there were a revision to the wording of the phrase. (NB - Hansard does not do this)

Lord Dixon-Smith: My Lords, I apologise; I left my brains behind. I apologise to the House.

My mother remembers using the phrase when she was much younger; it was common currency at the time. She wouldn’t dream of doing so now, but even if she were to have a complete personality reversal and start gleefully saying it tomorrow, she is not—unless there’s an awful lot she hasn’t been telling me—an opposition front-bencher, and does not have to weigh her words so carefully.

Lord Dixon-Smith’s “I’m just a bumbling old codger” routine may be firmly rooted in fact, but it might not prove to be enough of a defence to save him. While I’m sure there are many in the Tory party who are still happy to bang such phrases around when they’re at home, most of them at least have begun to realise it might not be entirely acceptable in public. It’s not solely a Tory vice, though; the aged Lord Mackie of Benshie, LibDem spokesman on Scotland, is the previous person to have used this formulation in the chamber—with the rider, “if such an expression is allowed any more”—during a debate on Iraq, to the minister, Baroness Amos.

Baroness Amos
Dixon-Smith, however, is on the front bench of the official opposition, which might just do for him. He wouldn’t be much of a loss; he’s one of the few front-benchers who frequently give the impression of not having not the slightest clue what they’re doing there—as opposed to knowing why they’re there but just not being very good.

Mark Easton on knife crime

The BBC’s Mark Easton on current reports of a knife crime epidemic:

After my post on Friday looking at the hospital admission figures for stab and gunshot victims in England, a story was widely reported that knife violence accounts for 14,000 people in Britain being admitted into hospital last year.

… I have checked out the story and discovered that the figure includes not only attacks but also accidental injuries from knives and other sharp implements. If one looks only at assaults with sharp objects (stabbings to you and me) the figure for the UK halves to about 7,000.

… However, knives have become political weapons. No politician wants to be accused of complacency, so rhetoric trumps analysis. It wouldn’t matter if exaggerating the scale of the problem didn’t make it more likely youngsters will seek to protect themselves with knives and the wider population will needlessly worry about what is a tiny risk for all but a few.

… Ministers want police to have better information for their community crime mapping. What I suspect such an exercise would reveal is that knife crime is rising in some inner-city areas, fuelled by gang culture, drugs and alcohol. However, it may actually be falling in much of the UK and I remain sceptical that there is good evidence of a national “epidemic”. [BBC]