Dru Edmonstone, the Duchess of Cornwall’s cousin, has been jailed for a ‘significant and sophisticated’ series of benefit frauds which saw him pocket £60,000
The Duchess of Cornwall’s cousin has been jailed for a ‘significant and sophisticated’ series of benefit frauds which saw him pocket £60,000.
Dru Edmonstone, whose great grandmother was Alice Keppel, Edward VIII’s mistress, who was also Camilla Parker Bowles’ great grandmother, defrauded Stirling Council and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
Using the names of his sister, his ex-wife, a former housekeeper, and an employee of his father – Sir Archibald Edmonstone, the 83-year-old seventh baronet of Duntreath – the 46-year-old submitted bogus claims for income support, tax credits, carers’ allowance, and disability living allowance.
Former financier Edmonstone, who lives in a house on the 6000-acre Stirlingshire estate his family were gifted by King Robert III in 1435, also fraudulently obtained thousands of pounds in housing benefit.
Some of the fraudulent housing claims were for renting a mews cottage in Kensington, west London.
Some of the fraudulent housing claims were for renting £2.4million mews cottage in Kensington, west London
Stirling Sheriff Court heard that he pocketed £60,000 between January 2014 and April 2017. He then used the money to fund high risk bets.
Jailing him for 21 months today, Sheriff Wyllie Robertson said a report by a psychiatrist revealed ‘a long history of deception and fraud’ including altering GPs’ prescriptions and fabricating evidence to a psychiatrist.
He said: ‘You behaved deliberately, in a planned way, in a way which required you to maintain very detailed notes about how you had gone about things.
‘To sustain a fraudulent scheme over a number of years, involving a number of different people, requires a degree of mental clarity, agility and ability that if you were mentally ill you might find it difficult to maintain.’
Sheriff Robertson said Edmonstone, of Blanefield, Stirlingshire, had ‘a long history of manipulative behaviour and sociopathic behaviour, rather than mental illness’.
He said: ‘The psychiatrist goes on to observe, ‘it appears that his family has been colluding in trying to attract a diagnosis of mental illness as a way of excusing the patient from responsibility for his own behaviour’.
‘Custody is the only appropriate disposal – you will go to prison for 21 months.’
Edmonstone, tieless in a smart suit and powder-blue shirt in the dock at Stirling Sheriff Court, shook visibly as sentence was pronounced, and nodded to a middle-aged, woman on the public benches before being led down to the cells.
Disgraced: Edmonstone was pictured handcuffed to a security guard today after pleading guilty to a series of benefit frauds
Edmonstone was appearing for sentence after pleading guilty in January.
His solicitor, John Mulholland, said that admission had saved a trial that would have consumed ‘weeks of court time’ and required witnesses to travel from various parts of the UK.
Kyrsten Buist, prosecuting, said the scam had come to light when his sister, Elyssa Edmonstone, living abroad since 2010, made ‘a general inquiry about making additional payments to her UK national insurance account’.
She found that the address that the Department of Work and Pensions had for her was none that she had ever lived at – but was in fact her brother’s home.
Miss Buist said: ‘She confronted him in the presence of their mother and he ultimately admitted he had made the claims using his sister’s name and her NI number.
‘He signed a declaration admitting he had made the claims without her knowledge or consent and the admissions were recorded by his sister.’
DWP investigators found he had even made phone calls to them pretending to be Elyssa. When recordings of the calls were played back, they were ‘clearly not her’ and in the opinion of DWP officials were in fact him.
Edmonstone, who lives in a house on the 6000-acre Stirlingshire estate (pictured) his family were gifted by King Robert III in 1435, also fraudulently obtained thousands of pounds in housing benefit
The depute fiscal said Edmonstone had ‘made false claims for a variety of benefits using his name and the names of others he is linked to’.
In one scam, he claimed tax credit and disability living allowance (DLA) by pretending that he was looking after a 12-year-old child with disabling mental health difficulties, including autism, ADHD, and depression, who was neither living with him nor, in fact, was disabled in any way.
He produced a bogus letter in support of the DLA claim from the GP practice in Balfron, Stirlingshire, saying the accused was ‘fully responsible’ for the child.
The letter was signed with a copy of the signature of local GP, Dr Sarah Boddington, apparently scanned from a letter the doctor had actually written for Edmonstone – which had in fact said she could neither confirm nor refute that the child lived with Edmonstone
Edmonstone is the cousin of Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall
In January 2014 a telephone call was made to HMRC, purporting to be from Edmonstone’s ex-wife Marie-Laurence Edmonstone, in respect of whom Edmonstone had falsely claimed tax credits and housing benefit.
A female caller claiming to be Marie-Laurence answered security questions before handing the phone to Edmonstone.
Miss Buist said: ‘The female caller has a Scottish accent, while his wife, in fact, is French.’
She added: ‘This fraud is not a case of failing to tell the Council of a change of circumstances – the accused has made false declarations and has produced what is suspected to be false emails to support that claim.’
Examination of Edmsontone’s bank account showed many falsely-claimed payments coming in – and ‘large payments going out, to a financial spread-betting company’.
Further allegations – including one that Edmonstone attempted to obtain further housing benefit from Stirling Council while using the name of Brad Pitt’s Fight Club film character Tyler Durden, and that he pocketed money taken from walkers at a pop-up cafe in a caravan on the West Highland Way while claiming to be selling refreshments for charity – were dropped.
Who was Alice Keppel? Edward VII’s mistress who described herself as the real Queen of England
Alice Keppel, who was the mistress of Edward VII
Alice Keppel became Edward VII’s mistress in 1898, when she was aged just 29 and he was 57, and remained the favourite of Queen Victoria’s son until his death 12 years later.
Throughout the king’s reign, which began in 1901, Keppel liked to say she was the real Queen of England, and that his wife Alexandra was not his soulmate — she was.
The Royal Family did all they could, after his death in 1910, to destroy evidence of Edward VII’s long affair with Alice.
His private secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, is said to have destroyed mountains of letters and private papers in a bonfire that lasted days.
Famously, when the current Prince of Wales met Keppel’s great-granddaughter Camilla Shand decades later, legend has it she seduced him with the words: ‘My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather — so how about it?’
Keppel married the Honourable George Keppel in 1891, when she was aged 23, and the couple had two children, but her husband’s lack of money led her to engage in affairs with richer men.
Her association with the king did much to help her family’s financial affairs. He gave her shares in a rubber company, which gained her around £50,000 – the equivalent of £7.5million today – and he allowed her to use his own bankers and financial advisers.
King Edward VII was also instrumental in securing well-paid jobs for her husband and brother, Archie.
Extraordinarily, the monarch asked for Keppel to be at his side during his last hours, much to the dismay of his wife.
Keppel died in 1947.