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Papers delete address from court story after complaint

A convicted benefits cheat has had her address removed from two regional papers’ court coverage after complaining to the Press Complaints Commission.

Sadie Collis was convicted in 2008 of fraudulently claiming £13,911 in housing and council tax benefits with her husband Derek over a three-year period, while having around £100,000 hidden in various bank accounts.

She complained to the PCC that the Chichester Observer and the Argus in Brighton had breached clauses one (accuracy) and three (privacy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.

She claimed  the articles inaccurately claimed she bought a sports car with money she obtained from the fraud, that she had stored the money in six secret bank accounts when it was only four, and raised concern that the papers had published her address.

Under the Magistrates Court Act 1980, newspapers are entitled to publish the name, date of birth and address of defendants – but while neither paper accepted they had breached the code, both took her address out of their online story.

They also amended the number of secret bank accounts she had used.

Mrs Collis also made a complaint to the Sun, which had picked up the article, about the purchase of the Porsche and how many bank accounts she had. They altered their online article.

4 comments

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  • April 29, 2013 at 10:45 am
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    The bare-faced cheek of the crooked and the feckless just grows and grows. Four bent bank accounts, not six? Who cares? In 2008, I wrote an expose for the Sunday Mercury in Birmingham about a pervert who spied on a teenage girl living next door by drilling a hole in her bedroom ceiling. The creep’s sister made a complaint to the PCC on 3 grounds (1) her brother’s privacy had been breached (2) it was wrong to call him a pervert and (3) the spy hole was made with a screwdriver not a drill bit.
    On that occasion, sanity prevailed and the PCC threw out the complaint.

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  • April 29, 2013 at 2:10 pm
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    Pathetic. Looks like they didn’t need Leveson after all if papers are happy to chuck their hard-won legal rights out of the window in response to a solicitor’s letter. Spinelessly running up the white flag to make a perceived problem go away, when the defence’s famous comment in Arkell vs Pressdram would have been a more appropriate response, harms the entire profession, or what’s left of it.

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  • April 29, 2013 at 2:38 pm
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    To be fair to the papers, she can presumably afford some pretty good lawyers.

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  • May 3, 2013 at 11:10 am
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    ‘Spineless’ papers? What a ridiculous comment. As any editor knows, any PCC investigation takes up hours and hours of time – time editors just don’t have these days. I don’t blame any editor for changing an online story that is five years old to get the PCC off his/her back, and to bring an end to the paperwork. Phil, direct your ire at the PCC – they should have told the complainant that what they are demanding is nonsense, and thrown this out at source.

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