At sentencing last week the District Judge reportedly said the case was "a deliberate, large scale operation of falsity .... engineered solely for financial gain and profit".

The defendants included five individuals and three companies with the highest individual fine of £272,000 reserved for the landlord who "instigated" the scheme, Mr Aleksejs Cugurovs.

West Northamptonshire Council's (WNC) private sector housing team began investigating the landlords after safety complaints were raised and attended at the various properties under housing warrants in September 2020 and January 2021.

As well as the HMO properties being unlicensed, the council officers found fire safety breaches and poor maintenance inside the properties. The five individuals used false and misleading documentation to buy the properties as single family homes from estate agents before converting them to HMOs and setting up companies to manage the transfer of rent payments between the tenants, the owners and themselves.

Reported in Local Government Lawyer, Cllr. Adam Brown, Deputy Leader at WNC and Cabinet Member for Housing, Culture and Leisure, said "This was a well-planned, cunning and conniving scheme for the purposes of financial gain. I am please the court has imposed a substantial fine which will hopefully deter rogue landlords and persuade them to comply with the law in future".

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