Michael Lewis, trading as Lewis Partnership and based in Gillingham Kent, has also been prohibited from carrying out regulated financial services business.
An investigation by the FSA found that Lewis had knowingly submitted mortgage applications in his name and his clients’ names that contained false and misleading information.
These applications included inflated incomes and false employment details.
Lewis also acquired, certified as a true copy of the original and provided to a lender a falsified payslip for one of his clients.
In his dealings with another customer, Lewis completed two fact find documents to establish the customer’s suitability for mortgage products. However, despite being completed on the same date, those fact find documents contained vastly conflicting information about the customer’s employer and salary.
Lewis then submitted two mortgage applications within a month of each other for that client containing the conflicting information which Lewis must have known was false.
These actions showed he lacked integrity and had breached Principle 1 of the FSA’s Principles for Businesses (“A firm must conduct its business with integrity”).
Because of the seriousness of his breaches the FSA believes Lewis poses a risk to consumers and lenders alike, and must be penalised and removed from the market.
Owing to the breaches, the authorisation for Lewis Partnership has also been cancelled.
Tom Spender, the FSA’s head of retail enforcement, said: “While the vast majority of brokers are honest and diligent, Lewis knowingly broke our rules.
“Lewis is the 107th individual that we have prohibited from working in the industry through our investigations into misconduct by mortgage brokers.
“We have said before that flagrant breaches of our rules will result in severe penalties and this significant penalty of £106,499 is further evidence of our approach.
“Many of our mortgage fraud cases have started out as referrals via the Information from Lenders scheme, but we are keen for more intermediaries to report wrongdoing to us as well.
“There is a mechanism in place for this, similar to the IFL scheme but to date there have been very few reports from the broker community.”
