LONDON, U.K - A refugee from Afghanistan living in a £1.2million mansion paid for with a colossal £3,000 a week housing benefit faces jail after admitting benefit fraud.However, But Saiedi's next accommodation at public expense could be in a prison following her guilty pleas to four counts of benefit fraud.
Toorpakai Saiedi, 38, a mother of seven, shocked Britain when it emerged that New Labour rules allowed her to live in the luxury home at taxpayers' expense.
One of her seven children even boasted that having the house paid for was like winning a lottery jackpot - and suggested it was 'mad' for the state to pay out so much.
The case caused such outrage that Conservative chancellor George Osborne has totally overhauled housing benefit laws as a result, affecting thousands of claimants. From next month the maximum payable is to be reduced to just £400 a week.
- For despite being scarcely able to believe her luck at the mass of benefits that flowed her way after her family arrived in Britain, she was greedily building up savings and hiding a private income of £16,000 a year, and keeping them secret from the authorities.
- Today she wore a blue veil and spoke through a Farsi interpreter to admit swindling the taxpayer out of £30,000 in housing benefit, working tax credit, and council tax credit, by not telling officials about her Barclays bank account.
- Prosecutor Henrietta Paget told Isleworth crown court that by concealing the account Saiedi was able to collect illegally around £29,000 in benefits between August 2006 and September 2009 while living in her palatial home in Acton, west London.
At the time she was receiving benefits totalling £170,000 a year, including an astonishing £150,000 paid to a private landlord for the rent of the property - the equivalent to £12,500 a month.
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