CPS £1m Taxi Fraud: Lovers Jailed For Six Years

Two former Crown Prosecution Service employees have been jailed for six years each for a £1m taxi fare scam.

Lisa Burrows, from Titford Road, Oldbury, and Tahir Mahmood, from Eastbourne Avenue, Birmingham, faked invoices for a fictitious taxi firm purporting to cater for witnesses between January 2008 and February 2013.

The pair, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud by abuse of position, used the proceeds over five years to live a "lavish lifestyle".

Money was spent on designer clothing, handbags, jewellery and holidays to Dubai, New York and Spain.

Investigators have been unable to find out what happened to over £600,000 of the proceeds.

Burrows had been a finance manager for West Midlands CPS for 21 years and met Mahmood when he was a taxi driver after which they became lovers.

Mahmood, 50, was employed in the finance department as an admin officer of the CPS for nearly five months before his arrest.

Suspicions were initially raised about Burrows when a CPS colleague questioned the amount of money being paid to B&M Taxi Services.

Auditors later uncovered illegible signatures on several invoices submitted by 42-year-old Burrows.

Officers from West Midlands Police were informed in February and an investigation was immediately launched by the force's Economic Crime Unit.

They identified Mahmood as a second suspect and enquiries later uncovered that the bank accounts on the taxi invoices actually belonged to him.

He had set up the account using a pseudonym and a driving licence in an alternative name.

In reality the taxi firm never existed and over a period of five years a total of £1,021,475 of public funds was transferred into Mahmood's account.

During sentencing at Birmingham Crown Court, Judge Williams Davis QC told Burrows that she had "grossly abused the trust" placed in her by the CPS.

"You knew how the system worked. You knew that the invoices were capable of deceiving the auditing system operated by your employer ... it is only by chance that the fraud was discovered when it was," he said.

He described Mahmood and Burrows' crimes as "a huge fraud on the public purse causing substantial losses to a department already under serious financial pressure ... where the proceeds can be traced they largely went on high living. The fraud was motivated purely by greed."

DC Mark Calvert, who led the inquiry, said: "What we uncovered was a prolonged and systematic fraud by two people who ironically were employed by an organisation which prosecutes those who break the law.

"Using B&M Taxi Services, which we believe was simply short for 'Burrows and Mahmood', both of them cheated the public purse out of more than £1m.

"They naively thought they'd get away with it, but were caught as a result of their own greed.

"This was a gross breach of trust by two people who should have known better. They'll now have many years in prison to reflect on their actions."