A MAN caught speeding through the Eden Valley repeatedly lied to police staff by claiming a woman had been behind the wheel.
Dashti Sharifi, 27, was clocked at 46mph travelling westbound through a 40mph zone at Kirkby Thore - between Penrith and Appleby - during the early hours of March 23 last year.
Speed camera images showed a male driver had committed the offence in a BMW bearing a personalised numberplate with similarities to Sharifi’s name.
But when sent official forms which asked him, as the vehicle’s registered keeper, to state who was driving, the 27-year-old lied in three separate correspondence replies, pretending to be a woman who claimed “she” was the speeder.
But sceptical police refused to accept the dubious explanation. And after they sent back enlarged images of the male driver and visited her supposed address, Sharifi finally made a phone call to confess he was the man at fault and had “made a mistake”.
It emerged the woman in question had not been in the UK since 2018.
“He admitted filling out the paperwork,” prosecutor Jeremy Grout-Smith told Carlisle Crown Court. “He said he did so because he drove for a living, and did not want to lose his taxi driver badge.”
A man of previous good character who had latterly opened a barber’s shop, Sharifi, of Lancaster Road, Middlesbrough, admitted doing acts tending and intended to pervert the course of public justice.
Mark Shepherd, defending, said of his client: “He was naive as to the serious of what he was doing. It is highly significant, a stain upon his character. This will affect his life and how he chooses to live it for a very long time.
“He has no complaints. He understands what he was doing was lying. He acknowledges there was a deception which was continued for a degree of time.”
After hearing mitigation, Recorder Anna Vigars QC decided to suspend a four-month jail term - “just and only just” - for 18 months. Sharifi must complete 200 hours’ unpaid work and a three-month, electronically monitored night-time curfew.
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