Father posed as landlord to claim £50k

A father-of-four who masterminded a near £50,000 benefit fraud by pretending he was his lover's landlord has been jailed.

Asaam Yaqub lived with Alamara Begum in their Black Country home while she was claiming benefits.

Begum already had one baby when Yaqub bought a £133,000 house for them in Yale Road, Willenhall, Wolverhampton Crown Court heard.

But the 39-year-old food company operations manager prepared paperwork for the authorities that claimed his 34-year-old partner was merely his tenant, said prosecutor Julian Harris. And Yaqub repeated the lie in similar documents until the truth was discovered after a tip-off five years later.

By then, there were five children under the roof, now aged between two and 13. The oldest was fathered by a different man and Begum had legitimately applied for council tax relief along with housing benefit and income support in August 2001.

By the time she moved in with Yaqub in the house he bought on a mortgage in 2005, she had given birth to their first child and they then had three more while he also treated her eldest child as his own.

The bogus tenancy agreement drawn up by him on three different occasions allowed her to fraudulently collect £48,168 before the fraud was uncovered in October 2010, said Mr Harris.

Mr Matthew Dunford, defending, insisted that the couple had made no money from their house which they were now renting after it was repossessed and sold to a housing association under the Government's mortgage rescue scheme. He concluded: "They were not living a lavish lifestyle. The money was used to pay household bills."

Begun admitted benefit fraud while Yaqub pleaded guilty to false representation. He was jailed for 10 months and she received a 24-week prison term suspended for two years.

Judge Nicholas Webb told them: "It was brave to have so many children when you could not properly support them. If you decide to take on financial commitments you cannot afford and then cheat taxpayers to try to pay for them, you can expect little or no sympathy from the court."