Hypocritical film-maker who blasted press at Leveson Inquiry is jailed for five years over £4million movie con on taxpayers
In a host of interviews Chris Atkins told how newspapers were 'monstrously hypocritical' and called for stronger regulation
THE extraordinary hypocrisy of a top film-maker has been laid bare after he was jailed for conning taxpayers in a £4.5 million scam.
Just seven years ago Chris Atkins shot to fame after directing Starsuckers, a controversial documentary which savaged press ethics and celebrities.
He later appeared on oath as a witness at the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, claiming newspapers were run by “people who, quite simply, lie for money”.
But the crooked movie-maker was today jailed for five years after a court heard he had spun his own “web of lies” to get taxpayers to fund his film.
A jury at Southwark Crown Court had earlier convicted the dad-of-one of two charges of fraud and one of cheating the taxman.
They heard he had signed up to a bigger scam that aimed to con HMRC out of £4.5 million in total.
Sentencing, Judge Martin Beddoe said taxpayers stood to lose £1 million alone from the dishonesty of Atkins and his producer, Christina Slater.
The judge told the pair they were guilty of “terrible arrogance” at a time when “public expenditure was under serious strain”.
He said: “The two of you put the vanity of your ambitions above all else in order to chase for yourselves a kind of celebrity status, different in kind perhaps to the one that you despise but not in practice really very different.”
The jail term leaves the crusading director’s reputation in ruins and his once award-winning career in tatters.
In 2007 he was nominated for a BAFTA after directing a film called Taking Liberties, which aimed to expose Tony Blair’s clampdown on civil freedoms.
Atkins told a local newspaper at the time: “He’s like a sociopath, disconnected from facts and reality.
“The more I see the more scared I am that he is clinically unhinged.”
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He later asked the UK Film Council for a grant to promote Taking Liberties, but got just £5,000.
Atkins moaned that Shine a Light, a movie about the Rolling Stones, got £154,000, while “my mum was going round her village handing out fliers”.
Atkins and his producer Christina Slater began work on Starsuckers in 2007, and they secretly plotted to take advantage of the government’s Film Tax Credit (FTC) scheme, set up to help boost British movie makers.
They teamed up with bent accountant and fellow producer Terence Potter, 55.
They used fake invoices to double the actual cost of the film, risking millions of taxpayers’ cash.
Meanwhile, Atkins seized upon The Guardian’s frenzied backing for his film to launch a personal crusade on press standards.
In a host of interviews he told how newspapers were “monstrously hypocritical” and called for “stronger regulation” to prevent abuses.
Incredibly, Lord Justice Leveson even granted a request by Atkins to give evidence without being filmed by in-court video cameras - making him one of only a handful of witnesses to do so.
When lawyers questioned the decision, the judge stubbornly refused to reconsider, hinting it was solely to protect the director’s undercover work.
Given a platform, Atkins took every opportunity to push his film, using his witness statement to boast about the praise lavished upon it by Hollywood luvvies George Clooney and Kevin Spacey.
Prosecutor Shane Collery told jurors: “These defendants and others essentially created a web of lies to assist others not here to obtain tax relief to which they were not entitled.
“They did this because this was the way they obtained funding for the film ventures they engaged in.
“That came first, that was what mattered to them and it was more important than if the taxpayer in this country effectively lost money.”
He added: “The Crown say that this film cost less than half of that which they represented to HMRC.
“We are dealing with two educated and intelligent individuals who are engaged in interesting work, work with a little glamour perhaps.
“However back at this time they appear to have decided that honesty could play second place to other ends.”
The guilty verdicts, delivered on June 24, left Atkins and mum-of-two Slater, from Tottenham, North London, weeping in the dock.
Slater was handed a four year jail term and faces bringing up her three-month-old daughter inside prison.
And Potter, who lives in Monaco, is already serving eight years after being sentenced in December.