A Scrounger who fiddled almost £150,000 in state handouts was branded a “profligate parasite” by a judge as he jailed him for 18 months yesterday.
For more than a decade Bert Mooney, 65, milked the public purse by creating two fictitious identities to falsely claim disability and housing benefits.
He would then use his Jaguar to drive between his Manchester home to false addresses – one 250 miles away in London and the other in Rhyl, north Wales – to draw the cash locally under his alter egos of John Mooney and George Mooney.
He was eventually caught after a traffic warden noticed that a parking permit in London was registered to the north Wales address and Department for Work and Pensions investigators were called in. Yet when he was questioned and asked if he was sorry for what he had done he replied: “Well the only thing I feel sorry about now is that I’ll have to pay it back.”
Mooney had faced sentence over claims he illegally pocketed up to £460,000 in benefits when he appeared at Manchester crown court but it was accepted that benefits totalling at least £200,000 paid under his real name were genuine and honest.
He admitted 15 charges of false accounting relating to £149,033 and said he would suffer in prison due to various illnesses.
But Judge Martin rudland told him: “It’s a feature of this case that nothing so far as you are concerned seems to be straightforward.”
During the scam Mooney used various bank accounts to store money including two in Ireland with one being registered under another false name of Gilbert Mooney. He went to such lengths to avoid detection that he even visited various doctors’ surgeries under false names to substantiate his claims.
For Mooney, Andrew Higginson said: “The combination of medical conditions that he suffers is significant mitigation. He is on all accounts a very sick man, with various conditions involved.”
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/...th-three-names
Scum -18 months another judge living in cloud cuckoo land
