LONDON: Abu Hamza faces having his home seized after judges ruled he must repay his £1.1mn legal aid bill. The hook-handed cleric, who is serving a seven-year jail term, claimed he could not afford to pay for his defence at his trial for soliciting murder last year. But investigators from the Legal Services Commission, which administers legal aid, uncovered evidence proving he was a shrewd wheelerdealer in the property market. On Friday, he was ordered to pay the full bill after the Old Bailey heard he had given false information about his financial situation.
The court heard that Hamza, 48, used a right-to-buy scheme to get a council flat in Hammersmith, West London, for £75,000 and sold it several years later for £228,000. A few weeks after that, he paid £220,000 for a 1930s semi in Greenford, West London, which has since risen in value to around £280,000.
Hamza, appearing by video link from prison, claimed his sister Ola Kamel Mostafa, who lives in Egypt, had bought and sold the properties and he did not profit from the sales. But Lord Justice Hughes said: “The account that the defendant has given me simply isn’t true. He has provided inadequate and indeed false information.
“Accordingly I make an order for the recovery of defence costs in the sum of the full cost of representation.” The order means that the Legal Services Commission will be able to apply to seize the house in Greenford.
Louis Weston, for the commission, had asked to recover costs, as submitted by Hamza’s solicitors, of £1,088,944. “Legal aid is not a gift for a defendant with means or a defendant who has hidden assets,’ he told the court. “There is clear evidence that the defendant purchased a council property of which he was the tenant from the local authority. He applies three years later to the Land Registry to register a transfer of the property to his son.
“It is sold by his son in September 2004 to a third party.
“The proceeds of the sale are used to purchase another property in October 2004 for £220,000 and this property was put into the name of the defendant’s. It is the hiding of the asset that we set out to investigate.”