As Paul Page opened a can of Stella Artois, his wife Laura gave him a
withering stare. The Belgian lager is not generally regarded as a breakfast
beer.
The royal protection officer was not thinking clearly. His life was in
freefall, his mind frazzled by the inescapable pressure of losing £3m of
other people’s money.
Like a gambling addict, though, Page believed salvation was at hand with a few
bets on the financial markets, or maybe Arsenal to win against Chelsea. He
had hardly slept in a week, he later recalled.
Six days earlier, on November 15, 2006, detectives from the anticorruption
squad of the Metropolitan police had warned Page that they had “specific
intelligence” that his family’s lives were in danger. The written warning
also said: “Threats have been made that you may be subjected to violence to
recover debts you apparently owe.”
Detectives informed him he was under investigation and should he offer his
resignation, it would be happily accepted.
They were on the brink of unpicking his massive fraud, which had sucked in
many of his colleagues. In doing so they would also expose a remarkable
culture below stairs at Buckingham Palace.
Many of the men who were supposed to be focused on protecting the Queen and
her family seemed as concerned with making money through financial
investments and property schemes. Others, it has since emerged, were also
moonlighting, running a series of other businesses alongside their day jobs.
Since receiving the police warning, the Page family had been in a state of
high alert. They confined themselves to their four-bedroom home in a
cul-de-sac in Chafford Hundred, Essex, near the Lakeside shopping centre.
Laura and their five sons, aged from two to 16, slept barricaded in a bedroom
upstairs, while Page kept watch downstairs by the front door, with a
bulletproof vest and a selection of swords and replica guns.
He was more than capable of handling himself: as a teenager he had represented
England in karate and he was used to carrying a gun on duty.
On the morning of November 21, Page spotted a car parked oddly in a side road
across the way. The driver was constantly on the phone and kept looking
towards the house. The police would not be so conspicuous if they had him
under surveillance, reasoned Page, who suspected an attempt on his life was
imminent.
He had hidden a small plastic case under the living-room sofa, inside which
was a silver imitation Beretta handgun. He discreetly retrieved it. Putting
on his jacket and some wrap-around sunglasses, he picked up the keys to his
car which was parked on the driveway. As Page got into the car, he saw the
man across the road partially emerge and level a long metal object directly
at him.
He was not sure if it was an assassin’s rifle or a photographer’s lens, but
there was no gunshot and as the man sped off in his car, instinct took over
and Page started in pursuit.
Soon drawing level with the other driver, he screamed: “Get out of the car –
police!” The driver gestured in response, as if to say, “What?” So Page
dialled 999 and explained what was happening. He did not end the call, so
the operator got a live commentary on what happened next.
Both cars approached a roundabout near Lakeside at great speed, with Page
beeping furiously. Council gardeners on the roundabout looked up as the
chase passed them twice. Then Page stopped in front of the other car, jumped
out holding the Beretta and rushed the driver, pulling him from his car.
“Who the f*** are you?” he screamed. “Is this a brown-envelope job to sort me
out?”
The would-be assassin was cowering. “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!” he
shouted. “I’m a photographer for The Sun.” AS the sound of police sirens
closed in, Page woke up to the gravity of his actions, and not just the fact
that he was acting like a gun-toting lunatic. How had his eight years as a
trusted royal protection officer at Buckingham Palace come to this? In
truth, Page had lost the plot years before. Last week he was found guilty of
a “breath-taking” £3m fraud after a lengthy trial that had also exposed the
culture of ill-discipline, gambling, brown envelopes and greed in the
Royalty Protection Command (SO14).
The self-described “East End wide boy” was not a vocation copper. Page joined
Essex police in 1992, aged 20, because he lacked sufficient qualifications
for an army officer cadetship, while his second choice, the London Fire
Brigade, was not recruiting.
Page’s karate skills brought him to the attention of a senior Metropolitan
police officer, who suggested he join the force. After three years on a
central London beat, in June 1998 Page moved to Buckingham Palace as one of
SO14’s main self-defence trainers.
SO14 is the responsibility of the only hereditary peer in the Met, Commander
Peter Lough-borough, the Earl of Rosslyn. Under him are 400 officers who
protect all the royal residences in London, Windsor and Scot-land. Most are
uniformed officers armed with Glock 9mm handguns, who patrol the grounds and
man security posts around and inside the palaces. A small number of SO14
officers work in plain clothes, guarding individual royals, who have unique
call signs. The Queen, for instance, is Purple One.
Page’s first job was to man the garden gate at Buckingham Palace, which leads
to the Queen’s personal quarters. He was expected to have the wooden gates
open so Her Majesty could be driven through without stopping. “But I was
doodling in my post,” Page told The Sunday Times. “She weren’t amused.”
During his trial, SO14 emerged as a sleepy hollow with lax management control
over the extensive financial interests of officers, some of whom seemed to
have forgotten that their main job was protecting the royal family during a
time of heightened security threats from terrorism.
It was an environment in which younger, entrepreneur-ial officers such as Page
felt they could flourish. “The prevailing attitude was that it was a licence
to print money. Thousands could be earned on overtime for doing very
little,” Page wrote in his defence statement.
Like the majority of SO14 officers, he was a constable taking home a basic
wage of about £2,200 a month which could be doubled with overtime. Yet Page
funded a flashy lifestyle for his family through share dealing. He traded
£9m worth of stocks and shares on a Halifax account in two years during the
dotcom boom.
There were exotic holidays, clothes and restaurants, and he treated Laura to a
£15,000 Rolex watch. Page’s own consumer weakness was luxury cars – Mercedes
in particular – and he had two in his driveway.
The gambling bug was deep inside him, but his impressed colleagues saw only
the trappings of a successful part-time trader, not the losses he had also
incurred.
In 2001 Page started the so-called Currency Club from the police locker room
under the palace stairs. He and a few close officers spread-bet on movements
in money markets and commodities such as gold. It was high risk for high
return, with no safety net.
“I’d be monitoring the markets on a laptop while someone covered my shift,”
Page explained. “And if we had a touch on some share going up or down, I’d
put the word out to those on post.” Armed police supposedly on the lookout
for threats to the royal family were instead getting share-price updates
over their radios.
With genuine returns of 70% a year, it was not long before officers from St
James’s Palace and other police squads were wanting a piece of the action.
More than 40 officers were involved, according to evidence given at the
trial, and according to Page’s defence statement it was common to have SO14
officers “using their time to make money from business interests outside
the police”.
The apparent toleration of such activities was remarkable. During his trial it
emerged that in 2003 Page was allowed to disappear for three years on
various forms of unpaid special leave. He would still appear at the palace
in his black Range Rover, but only to hand out brown envelopes of cash to
his police investors.
In 2003 Page registered a company, United Land & Property Developments
(ULPD), as a business interest with the Met. This became the vehicle for the
£3m fraud carried out under the force’s nose.
He used money invested for a property renovation project to fund a worsening
gambling addiction. As losses mounted he lured new investors and used their
money for further gambling, or to keep existing investors sweet with
envelopes full of cash. What could have been a successful investment scheme
had now become a Ponzi fraud like that operated by Bernard Madoff, the
American fund manager.
Police intelligence documents disclosed during the trial reveal a remarkable
series of failures and questionable decisions around the Page case.
As early as January 2005, a financial investigator for the anticorruption
squad had identified a serious problem with Page and ULPD, which he felt
made the royal protection officer susceptible to corrupt approaches from
organised criminals. Page had amassed debts of £500,000.
The anticorruption investigation discounted that Page was acting criminally or
was breaching police discipline, but it did make some welfare
recommendations to the chief super-intendent at SO14.
A disclosed note by the SO14 boss said: “[Page] should not serve in a
[command] which could bring embarrassment to the Met or leave the officer
open to inappropriate approaches from outside influence or persons.”
Remarkably, almost nothing was done until November 2006. By then Page was £3m
in debt, according to an internal minute, and descending into paranoia.
DURING his trial Page, 38, made repeated requests for a public inquiry into
the handling of his case and the culture at SO14.
Some of his claims – involving members of the royal family – were outlandish
and unsubstantiated. But several prosecution witnesses who had lost money
admitted under cross-examination that they had variously sat on the throne
(the officer in question conceded that he “might” have had his picture
taken), used police cars to escort cash returns from Page’s business, slept
while on duty and allowed friends and family to use the palace car park.
The lax culture at the palace is still apparent. Neil Watson, 41, another
royal protection officer, is being investigated after moonlighting with a
string of businesses.
He has been removed from frontline duties after allegations that he stole
£25,000 from a business partner. He is also facing a misconduct inquiry
after repeatedly using his police e-mail address to pursue private
commercial activities, but denies stealing any money.
He was a director or company secretary of six firms, including a shipping
contractor set up with an Iranian woman and a business making picture
frames.
There are further indications that Page’s activities were merely the most
serious at SO14. Another case involved a pyramid scheme known as the Hearts
Club, which a royal protection officer ran until he was moved to Windsor
Castle.
After the jury brought in its guilty verdict on Page for fraudulent trading,
the Met ruled out any further investigation into the culture at the palace.
“The Page case reiterates how seriously [we] take the standards it [the Met]
expects of employees, and how robustly we will act when these standards are
not met,” it said in a statement.
Clearly there is still work to be done.
