A stunning British mother-of-three who is allegedly involved in a large-scale food poisoning fraud has had her allegations against her abruptly changed by Spanish prosecutors.
Laura Holmes Cameron’s chances of winning her trial later this year against charges of fraud and criminal gang membership were slightly raised yesterday night when it became apparent that public prosecutors are not among her accusers. The shocking decision to drop charges was revealed in a court filing this week that ordered the blonde from Essex and the other seven British suspects to stand trial.
Holmes Cameron, 45, may still spend almost ten years in prison if found guilty since solicitors representing Majorcan hotels have ensured that she will be tried separately. However, public prosecutors have concluded that they are unable to identify the fraudsters or identify the precise transfer of assets related to the purported food poisoning hoax.
And they’ve informed authorities that, in their opinion, an acquittal is the best course of action for all eight British citizens, including Holmes Cameron, after it was determined that records and other evidence found in police possession “do not implicate the people accused in any illicit practices.” Their choice has been characterised as “provisional,” which leaves room for a last-minute change of heart when the trial gets underway
A prosecutor for the Majorca Hoteliers Federation, one of the three hotel associations that are now pursuing legal action, stated today that it is not unusual for a judge to find a suspect guilty even in the absence of a state complaint. “The public prosecution decision does not condition the courts,” stated Jaime Campaner. Numerous convictions exist in which state prosecutors claim not to be pursuing charges. They currently just have this as a temporary position, thus it may be changed during the experiment.
The Majorca Hoteliers Federation outlined their position late last year after being invited by an investigating judge to submit an indictment. They demanded a six-and-a-half year prison sentence for Holmes Cameron. They said they wanted her jailed for five years if she was found guilty of a charge of aggravated fraud and another year and six months if she was convicted of belonging to a criminal gang.
It left Laura, who now describes herself as a “residual money mentor” online where she says she “coaches women to win,” facing the highest prison sentence demand of all eight Brits from the hotel federation on the holiday island where she used to be based full-time.
The hoteliers’ representative called for her brother Marc Cameron Grinstead to be jailed for five years – four for aggravated fraud and 12 months for membership of a criminal gang – in their seven-page pre-trial indictment lodged with Palma’s Court of Investigation Number Two.
For another British national, Ryan Bridge, who was described as a businessman based in the UK who processed fictitious food poisoning reports “conscious the intoxications didn’t exist,” it demanded the same punishment on the same crimes.
Additionally, it stated that if found guilty on both counts, five other British citizens, identified as Simon Robert Flanagan, Tegan Jewel Sumerlee, Susan Amanda Lyle, Nicola Marie Sanderson, and Peter Carl Murphy, would serve a total of three years and nine months in prison.
Two other hotel and vacation rental organisations, represented by different prosecutors, claim they lost money as a result of the fictitious food poisoning fraud. As a result, they requested longer prison terms for the eight defendants.
Holmes Cameron and her brother were to do eight years in prison, while the majority of the other defendants would get five and a half years, according to an indictment filed by Hoteles Mac’s attorneys. Amla Explotaciones Turísticas requested that the eight British be sentenced to eight years in prison.
In addition, if the eight British are found guilty as accused, they could be subject to steep fines and requests for six-figure compensation. Before their trial, they must deposit slightly more than one million euros (about 850,000 pounds) with the courts, failing which their assets could be frozen.
When they were arrested in September 2017, detectives were reported to have calculated the damages to the hotel groups whose fraud allegations prompted an Operation Claims police investigation to be approximately £9.5 million. The two suspected ringleaders, Laura, the former proprietor of a pub in Magaluf, and her brother, were charged with recruiting accomplices who received commission payments in exchange for convincing British visitors to file fictitious food poisoning claims, then having a UK-based businessman handle the claims.
The Majorcan court overseeing the lengthy investigation issued a harsh six-page verdict early in 2018. It accused the siblings and the other suspects of forming a “profit-motivated organised gang” using a Spanish firm they established named Elite Project Marketing SL. “Through a form they themselves elaborated, the gang, which specialised in obtaining the details of British tourists staying in all-inclusive hotels in Majorca, convinced them to falsely claim they had been ill during their stay in one of those hotels and be able to claim compensation in the UK,” the statement continued.
The ruling went on to say the amount of compensation obtained in the UK with the consequent damage it caused tour operators and hotels between 2014 and 2017 “significantly exceeded” £176,000. Investigating judge Maria Perez Ruiz admitted at the time the final figure defrauded had yet to be determined. The same judge has now confirmed the case must go to trial, although its start date has not yet been set.
Holmes Cameron is being prosecuted under her maiden name and not her married name of Laura Joyce. Laura’s lawyer Gabriel Llado said after his client appeared in court in May 2018 in a closed hearing that she had admitted to passing on the names and phone numbers of holidaymakers for payment but insisted it was part of a pure market research exercise. He insisted neither Laura or any of the so-called “claims farmers” she used to gather data of tourists she passed on to others in the UK, encouraged them to get chemist’s receipts so they could make fake food poisoning claims as police and hoteliers’ representatives have claimed.
And he claimed Laura had spent just a few months doing it and stopped because she was earning very little.
No further action was ever taken against Laura’s wealthy mum Debbie. She was also held at the luxury villa in upmarket Bendinat the pair then shared near the glamorous Majorcan port of Puerto Portals which police raided, but was freed before she went to court.
After Laura was arrested, it emerged her Magaluf bar Playhouse had been identified as the venue where a British tourist was filmed performing sex acts on 24 men for a cheap drink in the summer of 2014. The fallout from the infamous video sparked a crackdown on bar crawls in the party resort after regional governors described the “outrageous” sex scenes as giving the area and women “a terrible image” and promised to “stop it whichever way” they could. Laura, who was not at her bar when the incident occurred, shut Playhouse down soon after.
In response to scandals such as the Majorca fake food poisoning scam, the British government announced additional steps to crack down on fictitious holiday sickness claims. The Benidorm hotel group HOSBEC calculated that British visitors were costing Spanish hotels approximately POUNDS 55 million in false food poisoning claims in the same year as the arrests in Majorca. British visitors to some all-inclusive Costa hotels allegedly faced a holiday restriction, according to certain accounts from the period. A number of con artists were exposed when hotel-affiliated private investigators combed through their social media accounts and saw that, despite their later claims to insurance that they had been in bed with diarrhoea, they had been sharing pictures of themselves eating and drinking.
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