Lichfield conman's appeal over conviction is rejected
A conman who fraudulently raised a £100,000 loan against his own grandmother's home has failed to convince top judges he was wrongly convicted.
Jamie Alexander Hunter, aged 42, used forged documents to secure the loan on his grandmother's home before cooking up a ploy to sign over the property to another man.
Hunter, of Kensington Oval, Lichfield, was jailed for 30 months at Birmingham Crown Court in July 2012 after he was convicted of obtaining a money transfer by deception and conspiracy to defraud. Three top judges at London's Appeal Court rejected a conviction challenge by the con artist, branding his complaints 'hopeless'.
Mr Justice Wyn Williams said Hunter raised the six-figure mortgage against his grandmother's home in Rectory Road, Sutton Coldfield, without her knowledge in 2001, using documents bearing her forged signature.
Later that year, he fraudulently transferred the ownership of the property to a third party behind her back. The offences were not detected, however, until 2007, after his grandmother had died, the appeal judge added.
Her son, Hunter's uncle, cottoned on to the scam and told police, who arrested Hunter and quizzed him over a period of months. He was eventually charged in 2011 and convicted last year.
Hunter insisted his grandmother's signatures had not been illegally obtained and denied wrongdoing. Before his trial began, he twice appealed for the prosecution case to be thrown out, on grounds that the charges against him were 'an abuse of process'.
The trial judge, however, rejected both applications and Hunter was convicted by the jury. Hunter argued at his appeal that the judge should have stopped the case and that the jury's verdicts were 'unsafe'.
But Mr Justice Wyn Williams, sitting with Lord Justice McCombe and Mrs Justice Patterson, said: "Having scrutinised each ruling given by the trial judge, we can find no basis for concluding that he fell into any kind of error."
