INSIDE SUTTON: An absentee Labour councillor admits he did not declare his own property ownership when he or his soon-to-be wife claimed tens of thousands of pounds in a government-funded, interest-free mortgage loan.
EXCLUSIVE by investigations editor, CARL SHILTON
Labour leader: Sheldon Vestey has deactivated his social media accounts
The “local” ward councillor for Hackbridge jetted back to London from his family home in southern Spain last week, and he is due to attend tonight’s full meeting of Sutton Council.
But Labour Councillor Señor Sheldon Vestey, previously a prolific user of social media for campaigning around his new-build estate and to help get himself elected in 2022, has suddenly vanished from Facebook and Twitter.
This follows Inside Sutton investigations into what neighbours in New Mill Quarter have described as “at least unethical” use of the government’s Help to Buy mortgage scheme by the privately-educated scion of one of the wealthiest families in Britain.
Vestey’s financial conduct might be a little more than “unethical”, with guidance from Homes England, the agency that oversees Help to Buy mortgages, warning that, “applicants who make fraudulent claims for Help to Buy assistance may be liable to criminal prosecution”. Oh…
In the past, Vestey, 34, has described himself, oh-so-modestly, as, “I am the only Sheldon Vestey in the world and my surname is both reputable and known.”
He has bragged online that he is in the “top 3% for household income”.
Very well-connected: the late Lord Vestey here with Queen Elizabeth on Derby Day. Public school-educated Cllr Sheldon Vestey comes from the same family
Schooled at Dulwich College (where fees are now £25,000 per year, plus VAT) and Croydon independent Trinty, before going to Croydon College, the Labour councillor comes from the family behind Vestey Holdings, the beef barons who at one stage were the largest retailers of meat in the world, and who continue to have substantial interests in Brazil for cattle farming and sugar cane production.
The family is still immensely wealthy, having featured in the annual Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated fortune of £700million. Actor Tom Hiddleston (Eton and Cambridge) is the great-great-grandson of co-founder Sir Edmund Vestey, the 1st Baronet.
And the Vesteys are very well-connected. Lord Vestey, the great-grandson of the co-founder of the business empire, died in 2021. He had been a prominent racehorse owner and the chairman of Cheltenham racecourse who, for 20 years, managed Queen Elizabeth II’s own string of racehorses.
Which was all much-removed from the sleaze associated with the Vestey business empire in the 1980s, when they were discovered to be operating a tax avoidance scheme.
Closer to home, in humble Hackbridge, and Councillor Sheldon Vestey, the leader of the Labour group on Sutton Council, was exposed earlier this month as having upped sticks and relocated to southern Spain, almost 1,000 miles away, without informing his local party officials, his political colleagues or Sutton Council.
On the market: the four-bed house in New Mill Quarter, built in 2018, now for rent at £3,100 per month
Señor Vestey’s four-bedroomed New Mill Quarter home is on the rental market, at £3,100 per month.
He owns another rental property, in Norwich.
It is the ownership status of the two properties which may have made Vestey remove his online history from closer examination, since the tax-payers’ money provided under Help to Buy, specifically for new builds such as New Mill Quarter, comes with the strict condition that you and your partner or spouse must not own another property, whether in this country or abroad.
In London, Help to Buy can mean paying no interest on a government equity loan of up to £240,000 for five years.
Vestey has said that in November 2018, when the Barratts-built house on Angora Close was bought, he was living and working from his Norwich home, while his now-wife, Grace Platt, used the Help to Buy scheme to buy the £600,000 property.
But an investigation by Inside Sutton indicates that Vestey’s recollections may not be entirely reliable.
Help to Buy was designed to subsidise the big house-builders, and offer a bit of help to those who might struggle to afford their own home. Through the government agency Homes England, a second charge is taken out on the property. When that property is sold, the government gets back its equity loan and a proportionate share of any capital gains.
On the campaign trail: Sheldon Vestey with Sutton Labour comrades on General Election Day in 2019
Vestey has owned his Norwich property since September 2016.
Vestey has admitted to Inside Sutton that this significant detail was never disclosed to Homes England. It is something which ought to have disqualified him, and his partner, from using Help to Buy in Hackbridge.
Vestey claims public records prove that he lived and worked in Norwich in 2018 and 2019. But he also admits to spending some time at New Mill Quarter with Platt, when she had recently given birth to the couple’s first child. This in itself could count as co-habiting and potentially would break the Help to Buy loan rules.
There is some evidence to suggest that Vestey moved in at Angora Close from the time it was bought in November 2018. His status as the owner of the Norwich property should have been declared, but that would have meant the Help to Buy equity loan was not available for his partner.
Vestey was elected to Sutton Council as a councillor for Hackbridge ward in May 2022. Grace Platt, his partner, was a losing Labour election candidate that year in nearby St Helier East.
Before he was elected, Vestey had already become a high-profile public opponent of the council’s SDEN heating system at New Mill Quarter. In his public campaigning, Vestey even accused a Liberal Democrat councillor, Jayne McCoy, of fraud.
Election candidate: Grace Platt, now Vestey’s wife, stood for Labour in the 2022 local elections
Newly elected Vestey’s register of interests on the council website in May 2022 showed that he was a landlord with a property in Norwich. This was removed from the public record in November 2022. Vestey claims this information was not required to be published and he had cleared it with the council.
The Norwich property was bought for £173,500 in September 2016, and was last mortgaged in October 2018, just one month before his partner bought the house in Hackbridge. Vestey says he made no financial contribution to the purchase of the New Mill Quarter property.
Vestey left the University of East Anglia in 2018, and was working for a company based in London’s Docklands. He says he remained living and working in Norwich, and only later developed a relationship with his now spouse, “spending time at both our homes before we eventually moved in together and then marrying, years later”.
Vestey and Platt are understood to have married around February 2020, just 15 months after the New Mill property was bought. Vestey’s deactivated personal Facebook page showed that he and Platt were a couple before 2018.
Asked if his ownership of his Norwich house was declared by Platt or himself to Homes England, Vestey told Inside Sutton: “No, the Help to Buy administrator imposes no such obligation.”
Homes England offers this official guidance:
The property purchased must be your only residence. Help to Buy is not available to assist buy-to-let investors or those who will own any property other than their Help to Buy property after completing their purchase.
Married couples own joint assets and therefore both parties are treated as joint owners regardless of the mortgage/paperwork being in one or both names.
Applicants who make fraudulent claims for Help to Buy assistance may be liable to criminal prosecution. Fraudulent claims will always require immediate repayment of the Help to Buy equity loan assistance.
The rules also apply to those living as a couple.
Vestey denies that he was resident at New Mill Quarter in 2018 and 2019, other than for occasional visits.
‘All-star contributor’: Vestey encouraging people to join the NMQ Facebook group in Feb 2019, barely two months after the Angora Close house had been bought with Help to Buy
“Documentation supports my place of residence through financial statements, employment records, the electoral role [sic] and associated paperwork,” Vestey said.
But in October 2021, six months before Sutton’s local elections, a strongly supportive statement about Vestey’s SDEN campaigning made by Carshalton and Wallington Labour Party, said that he had “pursued justice in this matter for over two years”. This places Vestey in New Mill Quarter from at least October 2019.
Vestey announced he was Labour’s candidate in Hackbridge in a Facebook post dated January 27, 2022. “In the last three years I’ve been proud to achieve some great things…”. This places Vestey in Hackbridge in 2019.
Throughout 2019, Vestey had posted regularly on local Facebook groups asking for advice on tradespeople.
Help required: Sheldon Vestey seeking cleaners and new skirting boards in Wallington from Feb 2019
In March 2019, when Vestey claims he was living and working in Norwich, he was posting on the Hackbridge Neighbourhood Community Forum Facebook group, together with Dave Tchil, who would also be elected to Sutton Council for Labour in 2022. The duo would later become the Facebook group’s administrators.
In February 2019, Vestey posted a link to the Facebook page of the newly formed New Mill Quarter Residents’ Association. Vestey would later become the RA’s chair. He was “looking to get skirting boards, door frames and doors painted in my house”, Vestey wrote at that time.
In June that year, he was looking for a broadband engineer “to have my router relocated”, and twice asked for recommendations for a cleaner “as mine unfortunately have ceased trading!”
There are other official records which appear to contradict Señor Vestey’s recent recollection of events.
In 2020, Vestey made an official application for retrospective planning permission for a ventilation system at the house in Angora Close. The application was refused. Vestey appealed. His appeal failed. But the planning official handling the appeal noted that “the appellant has highlighted that they were not informed of the removal of the property’s permitted development rights when purchasing the dwelling”.
“When purchasing the dwelling”.
In a resident’s question to Sutton Council in November 2021, Vestey said: “My family purchased a property at New Mill Quarter for hundreds of thousands of pounds. We did this based on the statements of Sutton Council and SDEN.”
Some of the clearest evidence that Vestey was living with his partner and their child in New Mill Quarter from Day 1 was contained in a Facebook response to a resident in May 2022, who challenged him on his previously undeclared Labour Party affiliations from 2019.
Vestey wrote: “I moved here in 2018, over a year prior to this with outages and heating bills of nearly £200pm. We had our first child and it changed my perspective on things and made me get more involved.”
“I moved here in 2018″.
This is confirmed by neighbours who have stated that Vestey was an NMQ resident “at the point of sale”.
‘I moved here in 2018’: a Vestey social media post from 2022 contradicts what he is saying now
A source told Inside Sutton: “The houses on this road were completed in May 2018, but Sheldon and Grace had to wait as that house was not sold off plan.”
And they added: “If you already have a property and have the ways and means to upgrade on the open market, then using the public purse is at the very least unethical.”
Inside Sutton asked an experienced financial adviser how they understood the rules on Help to Buy mortgages: “The rules in 2018 were clear. If you are married, in a civil partnership, or living with a partner as if you were married, you had to make a joint application with your husband, wife, civil partner or partner.
“You and anyone you’re buying a home with, or who will live with you as a partner or spouse, must not own a property in the UK or abroad.”
Vestey claims that the properties owned by him and his wife “hold the correct approvals for their use”.
Vestey says that this also includes permission to “temporarily” rent out their NMQ home while they are living in Spain.
And while making himself no longer available to residents via social media platforms seems an odd move for an absentee councillor, Vestey has told this website that he remains “dedicated” to his work and would not be resigning the councillor role for which he receives £12,616 in council-funded allowances each year.
The next Sutton Council elections are in May 2026. Unless there’s the need to hold a by-election in a ward should a councillor decide to stand down before that date, or is subject to something terrible… such as a possible criminal prosecution.
Read more: ‘Local’ councillor now based 1,000 miles from Hackbridge
Read more: Ofgem called in to rule over SDEN’s unfair heating prices
Read more: SDEN’s business plan ‘dishonest at best, fraudulent at worst’
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Do you have to be a Grifter to join the London Labour Party and get selected to stand as a Councillor, or does it just help?
Excellent sleuthing.
Perhaps Vestey-dinterests thinks that now we have Brexited, the UK no longer has an extradition treaty with Spain, and it will once more be a home from home for British crooks. He might be right. Under the European Convention on Extradition 1957, extradition is only possible in respect of offences which are criminal in both the requesting and requested states and are punishable by at least one year’s imprisonment, or where a conviction of at least four months’ imprisonment has been imposed.
If Sheldon isn’t up before the beak soon, we should be told why
Anyone notice the superficial resemblance between Vestey and Jabez Balfour. Keeping up the great traditions over time.
https://insidecroydon.com/2020/12/31/hard-labour-the-croydon-mayor-dodgy-deals-and-bankruptcy/