Benefits cheat to lose funeral fund

A pensioner who cheated taxpayers out of £34,000 in benefits has been ordered to pay the costs of her prosecution out of money she was saving for her funeral.

Judge Michael Challinor ignored pleas to allow Shanta Pallan to keep the £3,000.

The 60-year-old, sho suffers from ill health, said she needed it to cover the cost of her eventual death. Pallan lied to benefits bosses for more than six years by telling them she was not related to her landlady.

But in fact her landlady was her sister, who had bought the property at Arthur House Close, Smethwick, just three days before Pallan's first benefits claim.

Pallan also failed to notify benefits bosses when she was paid £4,000 compensation after suffering whiplash in a car crash in 2004.

She put that money, along with £1,000 from her bank account, into an ISA, but did not declare either sum of money, Wolverhampton Crown Court heard yesterday. By 2007, the money had grown to £6,250.

Pallan, now of Latimer Gardens, Edgbaston, Birmingham, admitted 13 char-ges of benefits fraud. She was overpaid £34,087 in housing benefit and £244 of council tax benefit.

Pallan has now repaid the council tax figure, but still owes £34,030 in housing tax benefit which she is paying back at £52 per month.

Judge Michael Challinor said he had "sympathy for the reason you want to keep your savings". But he ordered her to pay £1,688 costs and gave her a nine month prison sentence, suspended for 18 months, and ordered her to be supervised for 18 months.