Friday, June 19, 2009

Cawston Park hospital fraud trial collapses


The criminal case against Andrew Breeze and Dominic Wilson has collapsed - see EDP story. See Andrew's video statement and read Judge's closing remarks.

There must have been envy motivitating this trial, mustn't there? And I'm not just talking about from the two witnesses whose statements did not agree.

There has been an issue, if not scandal, about the way in which difficult to manage and place psychiatric patients have been shipped out of the NHS to private care (eg. see my comments on National Director of Mental Health's 10 year report). The problem is that it has been easy to make money out of this situation, not that there has been any fraud involved. Tony Chancellor, who set up the company that owns Cawston Park, made millions of pounds out of his business over a short time (although the Times story overstates how much he made - as Andrew Breeze himself pointed out at the time).

Good luck to Andrew in trying to find out what was behind this. Both Dominic and he were dismissed by Chancellor Care, so I imagine this story has got some way to run legally. Who was advising the NHS Counter Fraud Service?