A surveyor and his sons ‘swindled’ the National Trust out of £1.8m

The Daily Telegraph reports that the National Trust was tricked into paying for fictitious or inflated building work on estates and that a surveyor swindled the charity out of £1.8million by submitting false invoices that he was able to authorise, a court has heard. Roger Bryant, 70, is alleged to have submitted bogus invoices for either fictitious or vastly inflated construction and repair work on National Trust properties between 2000 and 2013. Payments for the work were then allegedly channelled to his two sons through non-existent companies that had been set up with names bearing their initials. Around £1.1million of the work was purported to have been carried out on farms and cottages on the Arlington Estate and others at Lynton and Croyde between 2008 and 2013. A further £700,000 worth of work stretched back to 2000, the court heard.