Hundreds of taxi drivers could be on the roads without valid insurance after being sold policies by a bogus insurer.
Sanjai Bhatt, of Birmingham, was recently jailed for 15 months after selling insurance policies to private taxi drivers through a fake company, Sunlight Motor Policies.
Taxi drivers, mostly from the Manchester area, were interested in cheap deals offered by the firm as part of a “sales drive”. It is not known how many bought the cover, as Sunlight, which also traded as Unicorn Insurance Consultants, had only been advertising for a few months. Drivers re-apply for their licenses every 12 months, which means those who have recently bought insurance from Sunlight or Unicorn may not be traced for a year.
Manchester City Council has issued a warning to taxi drivers that they will no longer accept cover notes from Sunlight or Unicorn when they apply to have licenses renewed.
A taxi firm in Manchester raised the alarm after becoming suspicious about Sunlight. The Motor Insurers' Bureau hired a private investigator to look into its affairs and then passed the dossier on to the West Midlands fraud squad. Detective Inspector Churchill, who headed up the case, said: “Bhatt was jailed for four separate offences, including dishonestly obtaining money and falsely claiming to run an insurance company.”
Sunlight was not registered with the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to sell insurance and therefore many drivers would not be covered in the event of a crash. It is believed to have quoted two business registration numbers in its correspondence but one does not exist and the other is for a plumbing business in London.
