14 Sep FSA Ban and Fine Mortgage Broker Over Fraud

A mortgage broken has been banned and fined £250,000 by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) after it emerged that he had carried out large scale fraud on a host of mortgage applications. Selvavinayakan Vigneswaran was caught after a tip-off from a lender which has just removed the broker from its own panel. He was later found to have submitted three mortgage applications under his parents' names . All three contained false information about their employment and income. He had even backed this up with false payslips. In addition it was found that he regularly falsified date on his clients' mortgage applications and had carried out the same process four times under his own name. He also set up a group called Cherry Finance under his father's name. However when the FSA contacted the father during the course of the investigation they found that he did not speak English and had no idea that a company had been set up in his name. In addition the FSA have also withdrawn the permissions of Stephen Selby in a separate case when he failed to respond to FSA requests for client files and various other pieces of information that were required to review his mortgage business. Tom Spender, FSA head of retail enforcement, commented "These two cases come from opposite ends of the spectrum. What unites them both is that neither met the high standards we expect of individuals working within the mortgage market and that means, inherently, they both posed a risk to consumers and lenders."