Sheehy/Maggie's Centre/Adogbeji Saints and Scroungers

In the UK, most of us work hard and pay our taxes.

Most people, basically, intrinsically, won't fiddle.

I'm happy I live in a society that has a safety net for the poor.

And we generally agree that it's right,

that a proportion of what you earn should go into a pot

that's there to help you, should you need it.

But that money doesn't always find its way to the right people.

I think lying to gain the benefit is so wrong.

It's awful.

If you believe in karma, it's going to come back round and get you.

There are big changes taking place in the welfare system

here in the UK.

And now it's more important than ever that the right help

gets to the right people.

This is the world of Saints And Scroungers.

Coming up - the scroungers that are out to beat the system.

A removals man moving more than just furniture,

as he tries to avoid paying his dues

after inheriting a large sum of money.

It seemed quite apparent from the very first moment

that I read the papers and examined all the documents,

that he'd set out to totally ignore all requests for payment.

And those who rightly deserve a helping hand -

an ex-police officer who's reluctant to ask for help

when he gets struck down by two life-threatening diseases

and faces financial insecurity.

It's the not knowing that's the biggest thing.

I was so worried.

When you lose a parent it can be a difficult and confusing time.

There's a lot of paperwork to handle and also, of course, the funeral.

Now, an inheritance doesn't provide any consolation

but it can give you a bit of a financial cushion through that time.

Depending on your circumstances, it can also be something

you're duty-bound to let the authorities know about.

50-year-old Michael Sheehy knows what it's like.

A self-employed removals man from Paignton in Devon,

he lost his father in June 2008.

But six months later, after probate was granted,

he received a sizeable inheritance - £114,000.

Any comfort this money had provided came to an end, though,

as less than two years later he found himself in the red.

With an involuntary bankruptcy order

and debts to various creditors of over £58,000.

Must have been one hell of a party.

So, how did this all happen?

How did Sheehy get into so much debt so quickly?

Part of the money he owed was connected

to his £114,000 inheritance.

When someone dies, the Department for Work and Pensions

automatically get details of the will.

They discovered that Sheehy Senior had been overpaid pension credits

by almost £23,000.

That's not to say that Sheehy Senior had deliberately defrauded anyone,

it was just something that only came to light after he died.

So, Sheehy didn't just inherit money,

he also inherited an associated debt.

But even if he chose to pay off the DWP,

he'd still be left with tens of thousands of pounds to enjoy.

Sheehy didn't want to give up any of his money,

as along with the DWP, he also owed the taxman.

As a self-employed removals man, he was responsible for paying

the tax on any income he earned from his business.

But he wasn't.

In total, he owed nearly £31,000.

And he wasn't great at paying utility bills

when they came in either.

Added to his debt was an extra £4,000 he owed to a bank

and water company.

With the associated inheritance debt of £23,000,

Sheehy was a whopping £58,000 in the red.

Even so, with his inheritance, simple maths still leaves him flush

and more than able to pay his debts.

But Sheehy ignored all demands from his creditors for payment.

They were left with no choice

and in August 2010 he was declared bankrupt.

Carol Butler is an official receiver from the Insolvency Service

based in Exeter,

and she was responsible for handling his case.

If you become bankrupt then you lose all your assets, on the whole.

There are various exceptions.

We might allow them their vehicle if they need it for work.

But they do lose any assets they have and we may look to see if they can

make contributions throughout their bankruptcy

towards their creditors, out of their income.

So it is quite a stringent regime.

Having been forced into bankruptcy,

he was now required to surrender any assets he had to pay his dues.

We knew where he was, we had his address.

So we knew our letters were reaching him. We had a telephone number.

It wasn't that we had to track him down, he was just not cooperating.

Nothing we were asking Mr Sheehy to do was to unreasonable,

and therefore he has a duty to provide us with the information.

Carol and her team could only speculate as to why

he was ignoring them.

All they knew for certain is that he'd inherited

over £100,000 less than two years earlier.

If someone gets a lot of money and then doesn't pay their creditors when

they were clearly in a position to do so, then that flags it up immediately

as misconduct, and something that we ought to do something about,

not just try and recover what monies we can

but also take action to be a deterrent

so that other people are not tempted to do the same sort of thing

because they think they can get away with it.

So what if a bankrupt tries to dodge their debts?

Well, then it's the responsibility of John Pearson,

one of 40 investigators from the Government's

Business, Innovation & Skills Department to prosecute.

It's our job to gather evidence when allegations of criminal offences

are identified to the organisation.

Put simply, quite often the offences revolve around people

who are have debt,

want to declare themselves bankrupt to get rid of that debt, and yet

they have some assets of one kind or another, whether it be

a property or money in the bank, and they want to keep that as well.

And clearly that's neither fair or right, because these people will

have creditors, and the idea is that those creditors should get

some money back.

Sheehy failed to attend three separate interviews that Carol

and her team had set up for him.

It had been a frustrating few weeks but, at last, a breakthrough.

We finally managed to get hold of him in October

but he still wasn't really cooperating.

It was a brief amount of information on the telephone about his assets

and his business, but it was a very limited amount of information.

He arranged to come in for interview but then didn't turn up.

Sheehy was dead set on avoiding the authorities.

Find out later if they can get him to cough up before he has time

to spend all his inheritance.

It seemed quite apparent from the very first moment

that I read the papers and examined all the documents that he'd set out

to totally ignore all requests for payment from any Crown department.

In the first place, he had no intention of letting the Revenue

know what he was actually earning and filling in his tax forms,

like everyone else has to do,

which leaves us all paying that little bit extra.

For now, it's goodbye to the scroungers

who are dodging their dues,

and hello to those who we call our saints -

the people who do everything to make sure that those in desperate

need of help, who are too proud or simply don't know how to help

themselves, get what they deserve.

Nobody likes being ill or going to hospital.

But there are certain illnesses and diseases with which the very

name itself can strike fear into you.

Imagine being diagnosed with not just one but two of those.

This is exactly what happened to former police officer Mike Peak.

He retired in 1998 after spending 30 years in the force,

but just nine years later began to find it increasingly hard

to recover from day-to-day tasks like gardening.

He went for tests and was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

I went through a range of emotions...

..ranging from, "Why me?

"What have I done to deserve this?"

My feelings were one of frustration as much as anything else because

I wasn't able to do activities or things that I was able to do before.

Mike's wife Sandra lived through it with him.

With Parkinson's, you have to initiate all the movements.

Your brain has to tell your body to do the movements,

so walking isn't so easy.

The one he continued to do of his old things was cycling,

but not to the same extent.

This was particularly hard on an active man like Mike

who had participated in sport all his life.

I've come to his Nottinghamshire home to find out more.

-So, Mike, how has life changed for you?

-Well, I used to...

Since I retired from the police force, I had my own gardening

and odd-job business,

and I wasn't able to do the jobs so I had to sort of fold the business up

because I just physically couldn't do the work any more.

And what did that do for your state of mind?

I'm quite a determined sort of character.

And I...

set about doing things that I could do.

And the specialist said to me,

"The best thing you could do is to be as active as you possibly can."

And so that was sort of a green light to me, if you like,

to be as active as I possibly can. So I started doing Pilates,

hydrospin, keep fit, because I've always been very active.

No longer able to work in his gardening business,

Mike and Sandra instead focused on trying to

enjoy their retirement, albeit with less money coming in.

We didn't allow Parkinson's to affect our life more.

We decided we would adapt.

We've kept up all our social life.

And that is why he does very little housework and gardening, so that his

strength can be used on our social life, because it's more important.

Mike was coping as well as he could with Parkinson's.

Then they noticed something else was wrong.

Michael had got a patch on his shoulder

and a strange lump on his ear.

It was like a bead at the top of his ear but it got bigger and then

it began to be a real problem, and I was sure they were both sinister.

So I asked him to go to our GP

and get it checked out.

Sandra and Mike's biggest fear was realised

when, after biopsies were taken,

they were told that Mike had cancer.

"Cancer" is a very emotive word.

And it conjures up all sorts of emotions, all bad.

With a lack of knowledge, you imagine all sorts of different things.

Despite Mike facing Parkinson's head on,

this news completely threw them off course.

When he got the realisation that he'd got cancer...

..he was a very frightened man.

As was I.

We didn't want to tell people close to us.

It's too scary a thought to sort of say to people, like,

"Am I going to die?"

Because you think, "Am I going to die?" But being a typical man,

he tried to hide it.

Living with cancer presents constant challenges,

not just emotionally but financially as well.

But rather than face it, Mike just wanted to ignore it.

I think when people are first diagnosed with cancer,

their initial reaction is normally shock.

They'll then often go into a period of grieving, actually.

They'll be grieving for the loss of a life that they had before,

the diagnosis and a loss of themselves.

It also affects not only themselves but their family as well.

Mike was presented with some stark options

if he was to give himself the very best chance of survival,

and it would change the Mike he saw in the mirror.

They carried out the operation for partial amputation of my left ear.

So I had, like, half an ear.

Lower half, top half being missing.

It looked quite strange. To me, in my eyes, anyway.

But the tests said that they had got all the tumour and as far as I

was concerned, at that stage, the job was finished and everything was OK.

Mike and Sandra went back to enjoying their retirement,

albeit having to make allowances for Mike's Parkinson's

until, just two years later, once again,

their world was turned upside down.

I was sat at Trent Bridge with my son watching the Test match.

I found the lump in my neck behind what was left of my ear.

I really started to get worried.

So I went to the dermatologist nurse,

got her to have a look at it and it was her, then, that referred me

to the specialists, and so it escalated from there.

The cancer had returned but Sandra and Mike had an excruciating

seven-week wait to find out just how far it had spread.

When you understand what it is that you have to deal with,

you find a way to deal with that.

But during those weeks waiting for the scan results,

you didn't know what you were dealing with.

Didn't know what we were dealing with.

Your mind wanders all over the place.

During that seven weeks I didn't know

whether I was riddled with it, whether it was localised or anything.

It was a very, very traumatic and very worrying time.

And you're also trying to plan for the future and trying to

understand what that future holds for yourself and for Sandra.

You don't know what the future is. You don't know if there is a future.

It was very scary indeed,

because my brain said he must be absolutely riddled.

We were in such fear that we were beginning to lose it.

We didn't feel that we could dump this on our children

and on, like, his mum, and we were trying to hold it all together.

But it built up and built up.

We were thinking the worst and it was just getting on top of us.

I was so worried.

I went to tears.

Mike and Sandra had no idea what the future held and the financial

uncertainty of how they would afford any major changes they needed to make.

They turned to a cancer care centre in Nottingham and Kate Martin,

a cancer support specialist.

Here at Maggie's we offer a programme of support

to anyone affected by cancer.

When Mike and Sandra came to the centre, they were

obviously very concerned for their future, for Mike's future,

and very uncertain about what was going on.

Mike was quite withdrawn, he was obviously very anxious

and I think he was finding it quite difficult to cope.

Sandra, on the other hand, seemed a little bit more upbeat

but I think she was just probably trying to be strong for Mike.

This lady came and took us...

..to a quiet room.

Talked to us.

Gently...

And we began...to come down.

She obviously could see that...

We needed help.

And just talked to us and went through it.

It was clear that Mike and Sandra desperately needed

the support that the centre offered

and I've come to meet Kate and find out more about what they do here.

This doesn't feel like a hospital or any kind of medical centre

that I've ever been to. Is that part of the idea?

Building design is a fundamental part of the Maggie's programme. It's very, very non-institutional

and I think that puts people at ease immediately.

It means that they can relax in an environment that is very close

to the hospital, but not the hospital.

So when Mike walked through the doors here,

you know, you have a chap who seems very strong in many ways,

but he's been given repeated difficult hands to deal with,

one after the other.

And finally, he's got something he doesn't know how he can deal with.

How do you start to approach that yourself?

Really, I think a lot of people that come through the door

are very uncertain of the future.

That's something that's common with everyone.

No matter what your diagnosis is, there's an element of uncertainty

with any cancer diagnosis, and whether that cancer will recur.

Mike's fears at the time were obviously very real,

about whether the cancer had spread, and along with Sandra, his wife,

we were sitting around the table chatting and Chris, our benefits advisor,

also started talking to them, and through that conversation he realised that they hadn't

actually claimed any benefits at that time.

And so he suggested that they well may be eligible for the Disability Living Allowance.

With the financial help of the Disability Living Allowance

they were entitled to,

and a mobility car to make hospital visits easier,

the pressure on the couple was beginning to lift.

A few weeks after having found the centre,

doctors finally gave Mike the news

he'd been so desperately waiting for.

Thankfully, his cancer was localised,

and treatable with surgery and radiotherapy.

It was going to be a tough recovery

but Kate was there for Mike throughout the treatment.

He started to get quite poorly.

He lost a lot of weight and he became quite ill

and very, very thin, and we were all quite worried for him.

He really struggled to eat and we would try and get food down him,

and he'd manage it and then he would be sick.

He lost a total of four stone...

over that period of time.

I mean, the weight just dropped off him.

During the gruelling weeks of radiotherapy treatment,

the centre became their haven, somewhere they could turn to.

Tell me how everything changed for you since you first came here.

Well...

I can't explain it, really. We didn't expect them

to help us in the way they did.

And it just is a release of tension because I didn't feel we could

load it onto Michael's mum, our son, our daughter, and even our friends,

whereas you come here and you let these poor souls get the lot.

After having surgery to remove the lump and completing

his course of radiotherapy, Mike's future is now looking brighter.

Your journey with cancer, where are you now on that road?

I believe I'm out the tunnel at the other end.

I saw the oncologist a couple of weeks ago,

who said that she could find nothing to give cause for concern.

-But you can never completely close the door?

-No.

-It doesn't work like that.

-No, you can never completely close the door,

there's always the chance it will return.

But the worst is over, things are as good as they can be.

You and Sandra have an amazing partnership, really.

We actually...

I've got nothing but praise for her.

She has stood by me all the way through.

So where are you at right now?

I'm determined Michael will not end up in a nursing home.

I've worked in a nursing home, it was good,

but I want him home with me into our old age.

Life is very precious.

And...

And life's for living.

And I'm going to love it.

It's time to leave our saints

and return to the greedy world of our money-hungry scroungers.

Despite inheriting £114,000 in 2009,

Michael Sheehy, "a man with a van" from Devon,

was forced to go bankrupt just 19 months later

for owing £58,000 to the Department for Work and Pensions

and the tax man.

So, had he really lost all his money in such a short period of time?

Carol Butler from the Insolvency Service suspected

that he wasn't playing by the bankruptcy rules and,

after months of trying, she finally tracked him down.

He did tell us he had a bank account,

but couldn't provide us with the details.

It's very difficult to say what his motivation was,

other than that he was not going to tell us about this money that he had.

It is difficult to see that there could be

any other motivation for not telling us.

Sheehy wasn't playing by the rules of insolvency that bankrupts should,

so Carol was left with little choice.

Because we weren't getting cooperation,

we sought his public examination at court

in January 2011.

Sheehy now had no option but to show up with his bank account details.

He'd inherited over £100,000, a sum that most people can only dream of.

So, they were hoping the account would show that BUT...

What we discovered was that, at the time of the bankruptcy order,

there had been quite a considerable sum of money in the bank account,

but in between the order being made

and getting what was left,

some monies had been withdrawn.

In fact, he'd actually withdrawn money

on the day following the bankruptcy order.

We did manage to recover about £26,000.

26K.

That is less than half of what he owed

and less than half his inheritance.

But finally, the Insolvency Service had the evidence they needed

to show that he'd been flouting the bankruptcy laws.

After giving Carol the run-around for months,

forcing her to drag him to court,

she discovered, from his £114,000 inheritance,

£88,000 had gone walkabouts while his creditors were still owed money.

This was now a criminal investigation,

and John Pearson, an investigation officer

from the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills,

was handed the case.

We're there to investigate and find the truth.

Most people are law-abiding citizens

and we only get referred a small number of the cases

that the Insolvency Service deal with -

the people that need to be dealt with properly

and need to get their just desserts.

And John was on board to make sure that Sheehy got his comeuppance.

By the time that he actually handed over that that bankbook,

the vast majority had disappeared

and there still wasn't enough in there then to pay off all his debts.

They recovered £26,000 from Sheehy's account.

But he still owed a further 32,000.

To suggest it's a victimless crime

because it's the Crown that's lost is totally and utterly wrong.

It's because those assets are lost to the Crown

that other people end up paying a little bit more tax -

the Treasury have to deal with it in one way or another.

Sheehy had clearly spent, or hidden, the remaining 32 grand.

But could they track it down?

He was withdrawing it in fairly regular amounts.

They were generally for £500.

Sometimes two days at a time.

He might go on a Tuesday and back again on a Thursday.

You have to ask yourself where that money went.

Where indeed?

He got his inheritance of over £100,000 in January 2009,

but by the time Carol obtained his bank statements,

there were just £26,000 left.

When you consider the amount of the original inheritance,

which would have paid all his creditors,

I think most members of the public WOULD find that quite shocking

and not acceptable behaviour.

John was dead set on finding the £32,000 still owed

to the public purse.

He sought witness statements from the HMRC, the DWP and Carol

to show, without doubt, that Sheehy had flouted the bankruptcy laws.

He then contacted Sheehy

and invited him for an interview under caution

in an attempt to find out where this money had gone.

Rather surprisingly, I have to say,

I received a reply quite promptly saying that he would attend

the interview at Exeter and would be interviewed under caution.

I say "surprisingly" because I knew, of course,

that he'd failed consistently

to have anything to do with all the other public departments

and ignored the letters.

But as I drove to Exeter that day to interview him,

I did consider whether I would be going on a bit of a false journey

and whether he'd, in fact, turn up,

because on a number of occasions, he'd made appointments,

said he was going to turn up for the Insolvency Service, and never did.

Astonishingly, Sheehy DID turn up this time.

Was John close to finally tracking down the missing money?

Having arrived, he then told me, quite clearly,

that he'd come along to the interview

but he had no intention of giving me any information whatsoever.

So, Sheehy was back to his old tricks again.

Tight-lipped and tight-pursed.

This time, though, there was no hiding place -

John already had enough incriminating evidence against him.

The lawyers did decide the evidence was clear

and sufficient enough to prosecute, that it was in the public interest.

Clearly, where at all possible, we were also trying

to make people realise that people who commit these offences

will be tracked down, will be prosecuted

and possibly will go to prison.

Sheehy was committed for trial by jury at Exeter Crown Court

in January 2013,

a mere four years since he'd inherited over £100,000.

He stood accused of three counts

of removing money totalling £37,600

from his accounts and one count of failing to disclose these funds.

Sheehy pleaded guilty to all four counts

and was sentenced to 12 months in prison.

What a sorry tale.

If only Sheehy had paid off that debt

when he'd inherited the money, then he would have been all right

and still had nearly half to himself.

As it was...

Well, once the DWP and the HMRC get their teeth into you,

they are unlikely to let go.

He may have the rest of that money hidden away somewhere in a suitcase,

ready to spend once again in shops and restaurants,

but for the next 12 months at least, he's on a strict diet of porridge.