An announcement from the Crown Prosecution Service:
The man who made false claims of a VIP child abuse ring and received compensation for his lies has today been ordered to pay £23,960.
Carl Beech, 52, claimed that he was among many victims of high-profile establishment figures who raped and murdered children in the 1970s and 1980s.
…Today at Sheffield Crown Court, Beech has been ordered to pay £23,960 within three months or face an additional year in prison.
Adrian Phillips of the CPS said: “The compensation money given to Beech was meant to support him following the extensive, sustained torture by high profile people that he made up and described to police.
“Causing unimaginable distress to the men he falsely accused and the families caught up in his deception, he gladly took money from the authorities knowing he had fabricated the entire tale.
“Confiscating this money will not undo the harm of his lies, but it is the final step in making sure that Beech does not profit from the shameful false allegations he made.”
Beech famously used much of his compensation money to purchase an expensive car as a status symbol. According to reports, the judge who ordered the confiscation has instructed that the recovered money should be used to compensate the former politician Harvey Proctor, who lost his job after Beech accused him of child rape and murder and who continues to be vilified online by Beech’s supporters, for whom the thrill of accusation needs only the flimsiest pretext. It’s not clear why this is not mentioned in the CPS announcement.
However (and as others have noted), there’s a some re-writing of history in the above, either out of sloppiness or as a deliberate diversion. Beech did not receive any compensation for the false and lurid “VIP sex abuse” allegations that he made to the Metropolitan Police in 2014; instead, the money had already been paid to him the previous year in relation to earlier allegations made to Wiltshire Police. As reported by the BBC during his trial last year:
Mr Beech accepted that, when he first spoke to Wiltshire Police at Swindon police station, he did not tell DC Mark Lewis everything he told the Metropolitan Police two years later.
Prosecutor Tony Badenoch QC took him through the transcript of his initial interview from 2012 in which only his stepfather, Major Ray Beech, and broadcaster Jimmy Savile were named as alleged abusers, with Mr Beech telling a detective: “I don’t know the others”.
…The prosecution alleged that he had “intentionally misled officers” in order to get a crime reference number at a meeting with Wiltshire police in 2013.
He could then use to make a claim with the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority.
Ray Beech and Savile were both dead by this time, and so the CPS reference to “distress to the men he falsely accused” is obviously a conflation with his later allegations, which were more extravagant by far. Beech’s success in 2013 raises a wider issue about how easy it is to get compensation out of the authorities by claiming to have been abused, especially when the name of Jimmy Savile in invoked: there was nothing to substantiate his claim, and in fact Beech never even met Savile. This issue has now been obscured by the CPS statement.
Meanwhile, Beech has also failed in an bid to appeal his conviction for perverting the course of justice. The journalist Mark Watts, who invested all of his professional credibility in supporting Beech, tried to create a sense of intrigue around this, noting that the application was “refused by a single judge behind closed doors”. However, when asked to explain this further, he added that “That is the standard way for an application for permission to appeal conviction/sentence to be handled at Court of Appeal. A single judge, on the papers. A full hearing for an appeal is only held if the single judge grants permission.” Watts also drew an explicit comparison with US interest in Prince Andrew’s links to Jeffrey Epstein, as if that somehow validates the “establishment cover-up” conspiracy theories he promoted.
UPDATE: Responding to Watts’s Tweet, barrister Matthew Scott explains that “Beech has the absolute right to renew his application for leave to appeal his conviction & it would be heard by three judges, in open court. It seems he has decided against it.”
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The money Beech defrauded was the taxpayer’s. The net effect of confiscating it, but then giving it to Harvey Proctor is as though the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board had compensated Proctor at public expense, for the injury to his feelings and reputation. Since Proctor could have sued Beech, like any other victim of defamation would have had to do, this strikes me as a wrong decision.
How, I wonder, does the treatment of Beech’s victims compare with the treatment of similar criminal, Gemma Beale’s victims.
Dear Richard, thanks for this compact analysis of Beech, very useful right now. It makes me damn furious that a fraudster could have got attention and won compensation initially, without evidence, when I am saturated with over 7,000 documents of evidence, already proven True at a U.N. investigative Tribunal in New York, that I was tortured and sex abused, by the State, the reason for decades of cover ups, also proven AND ON-GOING with is further ammunition for the registered “ad hoc Special Prosecutorial Tribunal, Special Procedures” at the U.N. Geneva on recommendation by the International Criminal Court, Office of the Prosecutor, which cannot proceed themselves as the origins of my cases (Nazi surgeon sterilisation experiments on babies, The Army Jobs, as social workers call them) predate the 2002 jurisdictional start date for the ICC. The U.K. never gets it right. Same-force, self-investigation always yields further evidence of evidential-corruption; Attempts by police and authorities to destroy evidence against themselves, in “You can prove torture, but not in the national interest to prosecute” State cases.