Man jailed for pretending to flat-share with deceased Grenfell resident in £75,000 fraud on council

A man who posed as a Grenfell Tower resident and claimed to have been flat-sharing, has been jailed for a fraud worth more than £75,000.

Daniel Steventon, 37 and a pharmacist technician, said he had been displaced by the fire. The resident whom Steventon said he had lived with had died in the fire on 14 June 2017.

At Isleworth Crown Court this week (5 September) Steventon was jailed for three-and-a-half years. He had previously pleaded guilty to one count of fraud by false representation.

The defendant presented himself as a victim of the fire and soon after he was put up in the Mercure Kensington Hotel with all costs paid for by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Between August 2017 and May 2018 the council paid out £54,099 in hotel costs, £14,310 on a food allowance at the hotel and £6,876 in bank payments. The total amount of the fraud was £75,285.

John Gardner, a district crown prosecutor within the complex casework unit in CPS London South, said: “Daniel Steventon lied for more than eight months and stole funds that should have been directed to the genuine victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster.

“Steventon claimed to have flat-shared in the building but no-one had ever seen or heard of him. His fraud was calculated and left the family of the deceased victim in pain and feeling suspicious of all those who had warm anecdotes to share about him.”

In a statement read out in court at a previous hearing, the sister of the deceased victim said: “This fraud has tainted the grieving process for my family.” She added that although the family had been united in the face of the fraud, it had left them unable to mourn as they should.