Footballer jailed after team photo reveals lie over injury
The Daily Telegraph / 7th December 2005
A footballer who hurt his knee in a tackle then claimed he had tripped on a faulty pavement was jailed for 14 days yesterday for contempt of court.

Matthew Hughes, 26, of Pontlottyn, Caerphilly, south Wales, also faces a legal bill of £32,000 in what is thought to be the first case of its kind.

Two friends who supported his fraudulent compensation claim against Caerphilly council - Christian Rowlands, 34, and Jamie Verity, 26 - were each fined £1,500 for contempt.

All three were found to have made false "statements of truth" - the modern equivalent of affidavits - in proceedings against the council.

Hughes dropped his claim after the council's new "fraud buster" began investigations. His injury - a tear of the lateral meniscus of the right knee - is more often associated with sports accidents than slips in the street.

The local paper reported that Hughes had scored a goal for Pontlottyn Blast Furnace, a Welsh League team, and had to leave the pitch hurt.

After a hearing at the High Court in Swansea, Mr Justice Silber told Hughes: "The team photograph that day was surprising and revealing. It shows that you chose to kneel on your right knee, which by your own account had been seriously injured earlier.

"It undermined the possibility that you had had the accident in the street. It is relatively easy to fabricate something like this and difficult to detect. There is evidence that a very large number of false claims of this kind are made against councils and it is council taxpayers who bear the costs.

"If the football match had not been reported in the newspaper it is quite likely that the fraudulent nature of your statement might not have been detected."

Mr Justice Silber gave a warning that people who made false witness statements to bring fraudulent claims could in future expect "substantially longer" sentences than he imposed on Hughes.

He said that Hughes's sentence would have been heavier but for the fact that he would leave prison owing £21,000. With the help of his family, he has already paid £11,000 costs arising from his abandoned claim.

Originally he said he had tripped on the pavement at 3.30pm on a Saturday afternoon in Sept 2001. When the council discovered that he had been playing football at that time, he changed the time of his supposed accident to 1.30pm, saying that he had felt fit enough to play later that afternoon.

But David Pemberton, an orthopaedic surgeon, said that if Hughes had sustained that type of injury in the street he would not have been able to play that day.

Dayton Griffiths, the council's risk manager, said after the hearing that its policy of challenging claims had saved taxpayers around £1 million in the past year.