DURHAM

A TAXI firm boss was ordered to pay almost £2,500 for letting someone drive one of his private hire vehicles without the appropriate licence.

Paul Smith, operator of Weardale Private Hire, of Lane Hill, Ireshopeburn, was charged with permitting Kevin Maddox to drive the vehicle without a private hire drivers’ licence.

Smith was also charged with permitting him to use the vehicle without the appropriate insurance and ordered to pay a total of £2,484.

Maddox, also of Lane Hill, Ireshopeburn, was charged with acting as the driver of a private hire vehicle without a current private hire drivers’ licence and subsequently ordered to pay a total of £660 by Peterlee Magistrates’ Court.

The action followed an operation by Durham County Council’s integrated transport and licensing teams at Evergreen School, in Bishop Auckland, last June, in which officers checked licensed vehicles and their drivers.

Maddox, who was driving a private hire vehicle, initially claimed he had forgotten his drivers’ badge but checks revealed he only held a licence to drive hackney carriages.

When interviewed under caution, the 58-year-old confirmed he did not hold the appropriate licence and that he had started working for Paul Smith in September 2017, when he provided a copy of his hackney carriage drivers’ licence. Maddox also stated he had been asked by Smith to carry out the home to school contract to cover for a driver who was on holiday.

Smith, who pleaded not guilty, said that when Maddox’s employment began he took copies of his DVLA and hackney carriage licences, however he admitted not doing all the appropriate checks due to lack of time and that he gave permission for Maddox to carry out the home to school contract.

In mitigation, the 56-year-old said he had a clean record for more than 23 years and takes pride in his job, it was a genuine misunderstanding and that he never intended to operate with no insurance. Maddox also stated he had a clean driving licence for more 36 years and it was his only form of employment.

Owen Cleugh, the county council's consumer protection manager, said: “Taxi private hire licensing is in place for the protection of the public as it ensures that all licensed drivers and private hire operators are fit and proper to hold a licence. It is important for drivers to hold the correct licence to carry out specific types of journeys as it could be the case, as in this instance, that they do not have the appropriate insurance cover which poses an additional risk to road users and passengers.”

Smith was fined a total of £1,381, ordered to pay a victim surcharge of £103, £1,000 in costs and his driving licence was endorsed with six penalty points. Maddox was fined £130, ordered to pay a £30 victim surcharge and a contribution of £500 to the costs.

https://bit.ly/2KjgwKl
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 NEW YORK

How We Investigated the New York Taxi Medallion Bubble
By Brian M. Rosenthal


It took a year, 450 interviews and a database built from scratch to answer a simple question: Why had anyone ever agreed to pay $1 million for the right to drive a yellow cab?

Mohammed Hoque, one of the taxi drivers interviewed for a recent Times investigation, during a shift last December.CreditKholood Eid for The New York Times

The story started, like a lot of stories seem to, with President Trump’s former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen.

On April 9, 2018, the F.B.I. raided Mr. Cohen’s office, thrusting him into the national spotlight. The next day, the top editors at The New York Times asked five reporters to start working on a profile. I was one of them.

The other reporters researched Mr. Cohen’s family, his legal career, his real estate interests and, of course, his work for the president. I took on the last piece of his business empire: his ownership of 30 New York taxi medallions, the coveted permits needed to own a yellow cab.

After a few weeks of reporting, the team learned enough to publish our story on Mr. Cohen. And I discovered enough to know what I wanted to investigate next.

At that time, the taxi industry was becoming a big story. Mr. Cohen had owned his medallions as an investment, counting on them rising in value because of the city’s decision to issue only about 13,000 permits. But thousands of the medallions were owned by drivers themselves, and two driver-owners had just died by suicide. Public officials were talking about how the price of a medallion had plummeted from over $1 million to under $150,000. Most were blaming ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft.

I had a different question: Why had anybody ever paid $1 million for the right to the grueling job of being a cabby?

When I pursue an investigation, I identify the single most important question that I am trying to answer, and orient all of my reporting around it. (For example, why did it cost more to build subway track in New York than anywhere else in the world? Or why did Texas have the lowest special education rate in the country?) In this case, I ended up interviewing about 450 people, and I asked almost all the same question: Why did the price reach $1 million? It became my North Star.

I heard plenty of theories, but I began to get somewhere only when I had an epiphany: No driver-owner had ever really paid close to $1 million for a medallion. On paper, thousands of low-income immigrants had. But while they had poured their life savings into their purchase, virtually all had signed loans for most of the cost — and never really had a chance to repay.

I needed to examine as many loans as possible, to see if they were as unusual and reckless — and predatory — as some of my sources said they were. But how?

I got a lead from an unexpected source: the lenders themselves.

After prices had started crashing, the lenders in the industry had tried to squeeze money out of borrowers. Many of them had filed lawsuits against borrowers — lawsuits which had to include copies of the loans.

I ultimately reviewed 500 of these loans, and I saw disturbing patterns: Almost none of them included a large down payment. Almost all of them required the borrower to repay everything within three years, which was impossible. There were a lot of interest-only loans, and a wide variety of fees, including charges for paying loans off too early. Many of the loans required borrowers to sign away their legal rights.

Armed with the loan documents, I started calling dozens of current and former industry bankers, brokers, lawyers and investors. Some pointed me to disclosures that lenders had filed with the government, which were enormously helpful. Others shared internal records, which were even better.

New York City did not have reliable digital data on medallion sales, so I used paper records to build a database of all the 10,888 sales between 1995 and 2018. The city taxi commission had never analyzed the financial records submitted by medallion buyers, so I did. Nobody knew how many medallion owners had gone bankrupt because of the crisis, so I convinced my boss to pay a technology company, Epiq, to create a program that sped through court records and spat out a tentative list — and then two news assistants helped me verify every result.

As I dug into the data and the documents, I sought out driver-owners. I wanted to understand what they had been through. To find them, I went to Kennedy International Airport.

The fare from taking someone from the airport into Manhattan can make a cabby’s day, and so drivers wait in line for hours. And over several visits during a couple of months, I waited with them, striking up conversations outside a food stand run by a Greek family and next to pay phones that had stopped working years ago. After talking briefly, I asked if I could visit their homes and meet their friends.

In all, I met 200 taxi drivers, including several I interviewed through translators because they did not speak English fluently. (Some of those men still had signed loans of up to $1 million.) One by one, they told me how they had come to New York seeking the American dream, worked hard and gotten trapped in loans they did not understand, which often made them give up almost all of their monthly income. Several said that after the medallion bubble burst, wiping out their savings and their futures, they had contemplated suicide. One said he had already attempted it.

The day after we began publishing our findings, city officials announced they were exploring ways to help these driver-owners, and the mayor and state attorney general said they were going to investigate the people who channeled them into the loans.

In the end, the three front-page stories that we published this week about the taxi industry barely mentioned Mr. Cohen at all.

But they did something much more important: They told the stories of Mohammed Hoque, of Jean Demosthenes and of Wael Ghobrayal.

https://nyti.ms/2EthWye
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"I'm forever peeling Mangoes" (singalong)

A taxi passenger fell asleep with a large knife in his possession - and said he was using it to peel mangoes.

Luther Francis gave the bizarre excuse when police were called to the vehicle by the cabbie after he passed out.

They found the 13-inch long knife knife in his possession and he said that he was preparing his breakfast with it.
Francis, 24, pleaded guilty to possessing a bladed article in public without  lawful authority.
He was jailed for six months after magistrates heard that he had previous similar convictions on his record.
They included wounding using a screwdriver at a nightclub for which he was sentenced to eight years in custody.

Prosecutor Sharon Thompson said that at 7.30am on March 31 Francis caught a taxi from his home in Cowper Street, Leeds, to Huddersfield. 

He got into the front passenger seat but then fell asleep and the driver feared that he was not going to get paid.
He pulled into a petrol station on Leeds Road in Mirfield and called police.

Miss Thompson said: "The officer attempted to rouse the defendant but he seemed to be under the influence of drink or drugs.
"He opened the front passenger door and as he leaned into the vehicle he saw an unknown orange object inside his hooded top.

in public without  lawful authority.
He was jailed for six months after magistrates heard that he had previous similar convictions on his record.
They included wounding using a screwdriver at a nightclub for which he was sentenced to eight years in custody.

Prosecutor Sharon Thompson said that at 7.30am on March 31 Francis caught a taxi from his home in Cowper Street, Leeds, to Huddersfield.
He got into the front passenger seat but then fell asleep and the driver feared that he was not going to get paid.
He pulled into a petrol station on Leeds Road in Mirfield and called police.
Miss Thompson said: "The officer attempted to rouse the defendant but he seemed to be under the influence of drink or drugs.
"He opened the front passenger door and as he leaned into the vehicle he saw an unknown orange object inside his hooded top.


"It was a large kitchen knife. He also removed a black sheath which was separated from the knife."
The orange handled kitchen knife was described as totalling 13 inches with a six-and-a-half inch blade.
Francis was arrested and said that he was going to a friend's house in Huddersfield and moving the knife between the addresses.

He said he didn't intend to harm anyone or use it on the taxi driver but was aware that carrying it in public was an offence.
 
Magistrates were told that in March 2012 Francis was sent to a young offender institution for 27 months for an offence of robbery. 

Then in March 2014 he was locked up for eight years after stabbing a rival in the stomach with a screwdriver in a brawl outside a nightclub.

The victim suffered life-threatening injuries in the attack outside the Warehouse in Leeds city centre.

Leeds Crown Court heard that the incident happened during a disturbance involving a large group of people and the victim underwent surgery after the screwdriver caused damage to his liver.

Because of the new offence Francis has been recalled to prison and is not due for release until 2023.
Catherine McCullough, mitigating, said that her client disputed being under the influence.

She told magistrates: "He was getting the taxi early in the morning and was very tired and having to eat his breakfast on his journey.
 
"That breakfast was two mangoes and he'd used the knife to peel them."

Ms McCullough told magistrates that Francis is heavily involved in his grandmother's care.

 She said: "Since he's been recalled to custody she's had to go into a home and he's expressed some remorse about that situation."

Magistrates jailed him for six months but the sentence will not affect his expected release date.

He will have to pay £115 victim surcharge upon his release and the knife seized will be forfeited and destroyed.

https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/i-peeling-mangoes-said-taxi-16354738