Chris Atkins (journalist)

Christopher Walsh Atkins (born 7th May 1976) is a British film maker who was jailed for multimillion-pound fraud.^[2][3]

Atkins has produced low-budget dramas.^[4] In 2007 he directed the BAFTA-nominated documentary Taking Liberties, which criticised the Blair government for undermining civil liberties and featured Atkins' friend, David Bermingham, a banker extradited for fraud.^[5][6] In 2009 Atkins directed Starsuckers, which criticised the media for unethical behaviour and tricked journalists into buying fake stories; part of the film was shown to the 2011 Leveson Inquiry, where he gave evidence.^[7][8] Atkins then made Dispatches documentaries that tricked actors into endorsing fake products and tricked private detectives into investigating complicit individuals.^[9][10] In 2013 he produced and directed an episode of Panorama which alleged that charities such as Comic Relief had made unethical investments.^[11]

In part of an operation involving over 100 officers from HMRC's Fraud Investigation Service and many arrests, Atkins was arrested in 2012 while living in a £3.5 million house in Hampstead, and released on bail.^[12][13] In 2016, he was found guilty on two counts of "Conspiracy to Cheat the Public Revenue, theft and fraud", sentenced to five years in jail and disqualified from acting as a company official for 12 years.^[14] The trial found that he had operated the fraud for years, circulating money and creating false invoices to establish a "web of lies" to give the appearance of having spent £5.7m on Starsuckers and another film that was never made, in order to obtain public money as relief.^[15][16] Atkins had worked with accomplices and had boasted about obtaining £115,000 of taxpayers' money from Taking Liberties without any checks, and that he is a "known player."^[17] The judge said he didn't see why Atkins had tried to use his evidence to the Leveson inquiry to reduce his jail sentence: “what you did say was at the time not accepted by some parties as accurate,” the judge said.^[18]

Bibliography

• Atkins, Chris; Bee, Sarah; Button, Fiona (2007). Taking Liberties. Revolver Books. ISBN 978-1905978038. 

References

External links

• Sentencing of Chris Atkins at Southwark Crown Court
• Chris Atkins at the Internet Movie Database