A Community Interest Company’s Connection with Serial Fraudster, Farah Damji
Damji Discovered in Ireland
In 2020, the Gardaí, the Irish Police, arrested a woman who had been going under the Icelandic name of Vignisdottir. After searching her address in Bachelors’ Walk, Dublin, they found that she had a number of fake IDs in her possession, which had been used to open an account with the Fintech company Revolut. Allegedly, this account was used for money laundering purposes, Revolut’s ID checks being open to exploitation. Gardaí also found a credit card under the Icelandic name.
The real identity of the woman was confirmed to be Farah Damji (otherwise known as Farah Dan). Damji, far from being Icelandic, was the Ugandan-born daughter of a multi-millionaire who had absconded from the UK in the midst of a criminal trial at Southwark Crown Court, where she was subsequently convicted in her absence of breaching a restraining order. And this was not her only offence. With a criminal history starting in the 1990s, Damji has been convicted a number of times through the years for offences including fraud, once spending up to £50,000 on purloined credit cards, and was given sentences in both the UK and the US, in the latter case being detained in the infamous Rikers Island prison. She even had a history of running away from custody: in 2006 she was found in Brighton five days after she was supposed to have attended a course in London and returned to prison.
Upon confirming the identity of Damji, authorities in the Republic of Ireland responded to the European Arrest Warrant which had been issued by Judge Michael Gledhill in the UK. Proceedings were initiated, bail initially denied, and later granted with stringent conditions, and to this date Damji remains in Ireland, awaiting the finalisation of the hearings. She was still under investigation in 2021 by the Gardaí for offences relating to the Theft and Fraud Act.
The View Magazine CIC (Community Interest Company)
The View Magazine was set-up by Farah Damji whilst incarcerated in Downview Prison, according to a speech made by Baroness Uddin in the House of Lords. On its website The View is described as follows:
A grass-roots social enterprise and campaigning platform that gives voice to women in the criminal justice system, provides an outlet for creativity, and creates for financial independence.
A further description is given on its “about us” page:
The View Magazine CIC is a Community Interest Company, limited by guarantee. Started as a prison publication by women in prison, paid content is by serving women prisoners, women on license and those affected by the incarceration of women. We are guided by an Advisory Board of women with lived experience, leading and other legal professionals and parliamentarians who lead our campaigns for justice reform.
Damji is not listed as having managerial control of the company. The “Editor at Large” is Clare Simms. Holly Bright is the “Director of Editorial Production”. Damji is only listed further down as a member of the production team:
The View came to the attention of Twitter commentators after an incident relating to a trans woman. The View had initiated a crowdfunder in order to publish a book called Someone’s Daughter, which was to be comprised of stories and professional photographs of women involved in the justice system, and which included some high profile women in law, such as Lady Hale and Helena Kennedy. Some critics objected to the inclusion of the trans woman, Sara Jane Baker, who had been apparently linked to violent threats made against JK Rowling. In the light of that, The View dropped Sara Jane Baker, and made the following statement, which many applauded:
But this did not entirely end the scrutiny. Since the story had brought The View to a wider audience, some made the observation that Farah Damji, the notorious fraudster, had connections with the magazine, and pointed to articles reporting that Damji was in the middle of extradition proceedings in Ireland. For example, barrister Barbara Rich tweeted, that:
Others, including barristers Sarah Phillimore, Allison Bailey and an account named @noXYinXXprisons aired similar concerns.
Instead of responding with measured assurances that its finances were in good working order, and clarifying the nature of Damji’s involvement in the company, The View’s Twitter account engaged in a vituperative attack on those who raised questions. There were accusations of harassment, and imputations that those who asked questions did not care about issues surrounding women’s rights, prisoners’ rights and mental health. The View also threatened the barristers with complaints to their heads of chambers and to the Bar Standards Board. Alongside this, Damji, from her personal Twitter account, attacked some of those defending Barbara Rich, calling one a “creep”, which has now wisely been deleted.
Comically, “Clare Simms” also emailed Sarah Phillimore to say that she would be “meeting with someone in the senior judiciary” about her “actions”:
The nature of that response only succeeded in raising more doubts in the minds of those watching The View’s conduct. Caroline Baksi, who became alerted to the story, went on the write an article in The Times on the 26th of August, which claimed that Helena Kennedy was “very troubled” to hear about Damji’s involvement:
When The Times reached out for comment, Damji said “Do not contact me again, or I will report you to the police for harassment”, echoing the earlier language of “Clare Simms” directed at the above women who made queries.
The following statement from The View to The Times on the 26th was similarly unedifying. It denied that Damji was involved in the governance of the magazine
Farah Damji did start The View as a prison publication at HMP Downview, as she has correctly claimed, and this information is in the public domain. She is not involved in the governance or the finances of it. She never has been.
And it went on to accuse Barbara Rich, Allison Bailey and Sarah Phillimore of engaging in “targeted harassment”, of carrying out “alarming conduct for officers of the court” (barristers are not officers of the court) and signed off by calling them “establishment handmaidens”.
After this, Damji not only made a complaint to Barbara Rich’s chambers and her professional regulator (the Bar Standards Board), but also preposterously reported Rich to the Metropolitan Police for harassment.
In a now deleted Twitter post, placed below Tweets which shared screenshots of her reports, Damji directed the following foul attack at Barbara Rich:
There is little in the way of doubt as to the vexatious and malicious intent behind Damji’s complaints, then.
What is Damji’s Level of Involvement with The View?
All of the above raises questions as to the level of Damji’s involvement in with the management structure of The View Magazine. The fact that she fled the country and was found with fake credit cards and a Fintech account, that she has a history of fraud offences, and the bizarrely aggressive responses from her and The View towards those attempting to make sense of the situation, give legitimate cause for concern to any objective observer.
I Damji’s Language v The View’s
The language in The View’s statement, and other correspondences on Twitter, echoed much of the way Damji has expressed herself in the past. In a non-criminal case from 2018, Dan (Aka Farah Damji) v Information Commissioner (Dismissed : Freedom of Information Act 2000) [2019] UKFTT 2018_0132, Damji had called a Commissioner a “lapdog poodle”, similar to the “establishment handmaidens” term in The View’s statement on the 26th. The tribunal noted Damji’s “intemperate and aggressive” tone and the found that her complaints were “clearly vexatious”. Previous to that finding, the Ministry of Justice said that Damji’s requests had involved
“abusive language”, “personal grudges” and “unfounded allegations”
Back in 2004, in the trademark case Mukadam v Indobrit Magazine Ltd [2004] EWHC 670 (Ch), Damji, as defendant, was reported as responding to the claimant’s solicitors by saying,
“I am not treading [presumably reading] any e-mails and will be making an application to the court to hear this properly. Please stop harassing me.”
Peter Lever QC noted that Damji had asked:
that I be removed from the case as there are “clearly racist and misogynist tendencies at play here”
In response to an earlier correspondence, Damji pithily said: “F*** off”.
All of these outbursts are marked by a similarity of tone to those that came from The View’s Twitter account and through its statement addressed to The Times. They are outbursts coming from narcissistic rage, directed at those authoritative enough to push back against manipulation. They make serious accusations and threats. They lash out with hyperbolic, colourful language.
If Damji is behind the statements sent out by The View, then her level of involvement is greater than peripheral. This does not prove that Damji is in control of the financial affairs of the company, but it does point towards more involvement than is first apparent when one looks only at the company website.
II Factual Errors in The View’s Statement to The Times
The statement addressed to The Times makes a number of claims that simply do not square with newspaper reports and known facts regarding Damji.
On the subject of Damji’s alleged offending and the UK extradition request, the letter says this:
Farah is not wanted in Ireland or in the UK, or under investigation or charged with any fraud or false identification crimes. These are lies and I have confirmed this with her solicitors. The Irish High Court has refused to surrender her to the UK because of her treatment here, by the UK justice agencies, police and CPS.
This is entirely false. We know from reports in Irish papers that Damji is being investigated by the Gardaí in respect of the credit cards and fake IDs which used a false Icelandic name and for the Fintech account that was opened under those IDs. We also know that the High Court has not “refused” to surrender Damji, since proceedings are currently ongoing, whilst Damji is on bail, subject to strict conditions. Damji is certainly “wanted” in the UK, given the European Arrest Warrant that was issued by Judge Michael Gledhill.
The letter also claims that:
She did not start the crowdfunder, Jess de Wahls and Rachel Ara did. Farah was not linked to it
We do not know whether Damji was linked to the Someone’s Daughter fundraiser. We do know, however, that Jess De Wahls claims that neither she nor Rachel Ara started it:
These inaccuracies do not lead to the inevitable conclusion that Damji is involved with the management of The View, but they do show that the account the company gives in its statement is untrustworthy.
III Irregularities
In Dublin in 2020, in High Court hearing relating to the UK’s extradition request, counsel for Damji, Mr Mulrooney, said that Damji had been “working for a magazine in the UK on a salary of £2,500 a month”.
Mr Justice Hunt also said on the 3rd of September 2020, discussing whether Damji was likely to abscond with regard to her financial position, that
he did not know the source of the money Ms Damji travelled to Ireland with and said that her financial situation was “opaque” regarding any bond or independent surety offered.
The £2,500 a month salary that Damji is said to receive from “a magazine in the UK” raises a number of questions. This a high amount even for person in a high-up role in a small company. How is it that a person who is supposedly of peripheral involvement is on such a large salary?
Note also that The View advertised other roles which require no little amount of work that are purely voluntary and therefore unremunerated.
Since Damji denied to the High Court in Ireland that she was receiving money from any trust fund from her deceased father, this was the explanation given for the source of Damji’s money on which she was living and which she had presumably used to leave the UK.
One prominent irregularity with the The View Magazine is the identities of the directors. It was said earlier that when Damji was discovered in Ireland, she had been using the name Vignisdottir, and had used an Icelandic name on her IDs. Upon examining the records of directors of The View, it is apparent that the filing history states a director was removed from the public records on the 23rd of September 2020, as it was “factually inaccurate or derived from something factually inaccurate”. Looking at Open Corporates, which describes itself as “The Open Database of the Corporate World”, the director who was registered to The View Magazine CIC was someone named Anna Margaret Vignisdottir:
This is quite remarkable. The very name which Farah Damji had been using in Ireland as a false alias, associated with accounts that had been allegedly fraudulently opened, also turns up in the company records of The View Magazine. What possible explanation could there be for the use of that name in both of those instances? One wonders if the Gardaí have explored this avenue in investigations.
Further to this, the name of the director Clare Simms has come under scrutiny. Simms is currently listed as one of the directors of The View at Companies House. But other than in relation to The View, information about Simms is very difficult to find online. Her LinkedIn profile now appears to be deleted, but when it was available to view it had this photograph:
A photograph which looks very much like that of another woman on LinkedIn, whose identity can be corroborated:
And this is a further dubious image claimed to be Clare Simms:
While Simms appears to have sent out emails, and signed off on the statement made by The View to The Times, the only other evidence that is readily ascertainable of her is the deleted LinkedIn account and the two suspicious photographs.
In the past, managers supposedly behind Damji’s publications have also been difficult to locate. Back when Damji published her memoirs, Try Me, in 2009, she did so with a publisher called Ark Press. Sunny Hundal wrote at the time that
Farah Damji claims that Try Me is being published by Ark Press, run by a woman by the name of Anna Cohen. So far it has been remarkably difficult to get Anna Cohen on the phone or even meet her in person at the office.
Any attempts to reach Ms Cohen at the office are rebuffed at the intercom and visitors are asked to make an appointment before they come into the office. It’s not clear what the secrecy is over. My attempts to contact Ms Cohen by phone were also rebuffed.
In this post from Ark Press, we learn that the publisher went “very quiet during the time Farah was being held on remand”:
Another person associated with the company is “James Wedgewood”. He was listed as a guarantor in the application of incorporation. There is a man who lives at the address listed at Companies House, but his name is James Wedgeworth, not Wedgewood.
Ultimately, then, there are doubts arising from many of the identities of those who are supposed to be involved in the formation and directorship of the company. The only prominent person who is easily verifiable when The View is mentioned in public is Damji, although she does not appear on any Companies House documentation, and The View’s website only lists her as part of the production team.
Damji has written numerous articles describing herself as the Editor of the magazine(e.g. for Uncommon Ground Media), has appeared on a podcast with Jeremy Dein QC and narrated several videos promoting The View.
Additionally, after Damji complained to IPSO (the press regulator) about Baksi’s Times article, she shared a screenshot of the response by IPSO’s Max Coulson-Windebank. Coulson-Windebank says in his email that
I’d be grateful if you could provide a link to the website of The View, showing that you are the editor of the magazine
It is possible to infer from this that Damji had made the representation in her complaint that she was the editor of The View.
One gets the impression that she is the only real public face of the magazine, the other supposed managers are not locatable. From the interviews, she appears to be The View’s guiding hand, intimately involved with the way in which it is run.
Further evidence of Damji’s guiding hand in the magazine is the fundraiser for ‘Miss L’, who is hoping to sue the NHS. The crowdfund on the Crowdjustice website, brought by case owner “Clare Simms” representing The View, describes Miss L as receiving inadequate treatment in respect of her mental health problems. A proposed case is to be brought against the CNWL NHS Foundation Trust for failing to treat the apparent initial misdiagnosis of “Bipolar Personality Disorder” (perhaps meaning Borderline Personality Disorder) and the later diagnosis of “Complex Traumatic Stress Disorder” (perhaps meaning Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).
It was later revealed by Sky News that Miss L is, in fact, Farah Damji, who was apparently misdiagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and then diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It reports that she is seeking at least £70,000 in damages from the NHS.
This demonstrates that The View is serving, in part at least, as a vehicle for Damji to pursue her interests, Damji attempting to conceal some of that self-interestedness. One might question whether it is really in the community interest for The View as a CIC to pursue Damji’s claim for £70,000 in damages.
So, to summarise:
- Damji fled from the UK to Ireland during a criminal trial and claimed to be paid £2,500 a month by The View
- The alias that she had used in Ireland was listed as a director of The View at Companies House, until it was taken off in September 2020
- The identities of the director, Clare Simms, and the guarantor, “James Wedgewood” are not easy to verify independently
- Damji has stated many times that she is the Editor of the magazine, contrary to what is claimed on the website of The View
- The View seems closely aligned to following Damji’s interests, as one can see in its crowdfunding of Damji’s case to sue the NHS
All of the above material, then, suggests that Damji’s role is not peripheral in the slightest.
Conclusion: Rehabilitation and Damji’s Pattern of Offending
In R v Damji [2020] EWCA Crim 1774, the Court of Appeal reported the judge at first instance’s remarks on Damji’s conduct up to that that date as follows:
[T]he appellant’s behaviour over many years demonstrated that she had no respect for anyone but herself. Her criminal record showed that she paid no heed to her obligation to obey the law. She was 53 years old and had appeared before the courts in England on five previous occasions. The offences of stalking in 2016 were so serious that a sentence of five years’ imprisonment had been imposed
After Damji’s conviction in 2010, following a £17,500 housing benefit fraud, Judge Aiden Marron QC observed that
The level of dishonesty at every conceivable juncture is so persistent it’s the type of case I have never come across before […] This was a scheme dripping with dishonesty from every corner
In the 2010 book Gangland by Tony Thompson, an associate of Damji’s from the 2000s is quoted as saying
When you first meet her she comes across as incredibly cultured business-like and totally believable […] But it’s all a sham. It’s all smoke and mirrors. She’s a first class confidence trickster. You can’t believe anything she says. You can’t trust anything she does. She reinvents herself all the time. She’s dangerous. She doesn’t do anything without having some or other scheme in place. You have to watch her like a hawk. And for God’s sake, whatever you do don’t let her get hold of your credit card
It has been argued that if one supports rehabilitation, that it necessarily follows that it would be wrong to object to Damji’s involvement with The View Magazine. This is not a convincing argument. First, Damji was reported as being investigated for alleged fraud offences in Ireland in 2020, and she absconded from the UK before she was sentenced for breaching a restraining order, so there is the suspicion that she has not put her criminal past behind her. Second, Damji has a history of fraud offences going back to the 1990s. She has links to these offences back when she was in charge of the magazine Indobrit, later called Another Generation after trademark litigation, where she stole credit cards and left staff unpaid. Before that, in New York, she was convicted of ‘five counts of grand larceny, possession of forged documents and tampering with official records’, as the book Gangland states. And she was convicted in 2010 for housing benefit fraud. One can still believe in rehabilitation and simultaneously think that certain roles are inappropriate for certain offenders without running into inconsistency.
It is not, therefore, unreasonable to be cautious when considering the closeness of Damji to a community interest company and magazine, especially given her conduct whilst at the helm of Indobrit/Another Generation. Even if she had “paid her debt to society” and noticeably made efforts to reform, it would still be advisable to exercise caution, just as one might impose director disqualifications alongside prison sentences, so that ex-directors who have criminal histories are not given the opportunity to parallel their previous offences in the future.
It is rather unfortunate, then, that interviewers, such as Jeremy Dein QC and Legally Feminist, who invited Damji onto their podcasts, giving her an opportunity to advertise The View, showed little interest in examining her past fraud. This is not unlike the way the media has previously covered Damji. The Independent said in 2011 that
She remains a curiously likeable character. Journalists, meanwhile, have found it difficult to condemn her. Recent coverage of her tale has been remarkably sympathetic.
Damji is a woman with a long history of offending, particularly with crimes related to dishonesty. Any indication that she is involved in the management of a company is naturally a cause of concern. The details about The View that have since come to light only add to that concern.
UPDATE:
Damji’s complaint to IPSO was not upheld:
https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/ruling/?id=09546-21
Acknowledgments
Credit for the information compiled here cannot be given to the author. Several accounts on Twitter raised the subject of Damji’s involvement with The View and diligently collected information, including Barbara Rich, who can take credit for most of the detective work on this subject, Sarah Phillimore, Allison Bailey, and @noXYinXXprisons, amongst others.
[1] https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-40041368.html
[2] https://www.amlintelligence.com/2020/12/daughter-of-wealthy-south-african-property-tycoon-using-icelandic-and-uk-identities-arrested-on-suspicion-of-using-revolut-to-launder-money/
[3] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/serial-fraudster-on-the-run-from-uk-authorities-is-arrested-in-dublin-1.4332524
[4] (n 1).
[5] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/5242934.stm
[6] https://www.hackneyhive.co.uk/index/2010/08/shaun-attwood-farah-damji-back-in-stoke-newington-2/
[7] (n 5).
[8] https://laois-nationalist.ie/2021/03/26/on-the-run-con-woman-who-fled-her-uk-trial-granted-bail-by-high-court/
[9] https://www.independent.ie/news/notorious-con-woman-arrested-in-jail-by-fraud-squad-officers-39815083.html
[10] https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2019-07-25/debates/F20612D1-FFC0-4E41-82D9-3DDA646E1C04/CriminalJusticeSystemWomen#contribution-A898DA32-AE78-4423-8427-7841E5E924C2
