A solicitor’s promising legal career today lies in tatters after she lied to police in a speeding points scam.
Asha Khan was involved in a plot to cover her father’s repeated lies after he was caught breaking the law in 2010 as he drove along Jesmond Road, Newcastle.
Property mogul and convenience store owner Mohammed Khan kept silent when the police issued a fixed penalty notice to the family address.
Instead, Asha sent officers the details of one of her brother’s friends, recovering alcoholic David Moat, who had been coaxed into the scam with the offer of half a bottle of whisky.
But 31-year-old Asha, of Grainger Park Road, Newcastle, who studied for 10 years to work as a trainee solicitor at her family’s Newcastle-based KK Solicitors firm, was arrested and put in police cells after the scam emerged.
Now she has walked free from court despite the Recorder of York, Stephen Ashurst, drawing comparisons with the Chris Huhne scandal. Sentencing the trio at York Crown Court, Recorder Ashurst said: “At the heart of this case in an initial theme – a theme of lies to protect you, Mohammed Khan, from the consequences of your driving.
“Put simply, had you been honest from the start the very considerable turmoil many members of your families have suffered could have been avoided.”
Mohammed Khan was caught speeding twice in 2008 but made a bogus disclosure to police in which he claimed someone else was driving his Jaguar along Jesmond Road, Newcastle.
On August 14, 2010 he was again captured on speed cameras breaking the limit in his daughter’s BMW, which he had given to her as a graduation present, but refused to take the blame.
During a sentencing hearing at York Crown Court, Asha’s barrister Glenn Gatland produced references from barristers and professionals across Tyneside’s legal spectrum and said she had been subject to racist abuse during her life.
Mr Gatland said: “She speaks very movingly about how their father would drive them to school in Sunderland where, in the 1990s, they were subject to bullying because of the clothes they wore, and there was a degree of racism against her and her young sister.” He claimed she had “succumbed to family pressure” because of her Muslim background.
Robin Patton, mitigating for Mohammed Khan, said he had developed arthritis, diabetes and the early onset of dementia. He said: “He feels enormous pain at the situation his own children have been forced to confront.”
He also said the Mohammed Khan had suffered abuse when he ran a shop in Pennywell in Sunderland, where “racist abuse was a way of punctuating a sentence”.
The 70-year-old, of Grainger Park Road, Newcastle, entered guilty pleas to perverting the course of justice and insurance offences. He was handed a nine-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, and ordered to pay £650 costs.
Asha Khan was found guilty of perverting the course of justice.
She was sentenced to 10 months in jail, suspended for two years, and handed a 12-month supervision order.
Moat, 48, of St Lukes Road, North Shields, was told to serve six months in prison, suspended for two years, with a 12-month supervision order, after admitting perverting the course of justice.
His barrister, Paul Smith, said “some may take the view he’s the perfect patsy because of his addiction, his vulnerability and his background”.