Struck-off GP Finds New Way To Exploit Elderly

Doctor guilty of unprofessional conduct has developed a profitable alternative speciality; preying on old women.

A FEW WEEKS AGO, UK-based businessman Andrew Wood became very concerned when he noticed that a number of strange transactions were taking place from the bank account of his 82-year-old mother Marguerite Harness-Wood in Cape Town. Wood has power of attorney to manage his mother’s affairs.

“She doesn’t normally spend money on a regular basis, but suddenly there were withdrawals of about R2,000 every day. This happened over a period of about two weeks,” Wood told Noseweek. “She’d ring me and say ‘I need R2,000 for food’, then she’d phone again and say she needed it for fuel and other things. I would put the money in and it would be gone the next day. Then she’d call again… I was worried that something was going wrong. I rang her and asked her to tell me about these transactions. She said I had to trust her, that she knew what she was doing – but she wouldn’t tell me why she had been withdrawing the cash.”

Alarm bells went off when his mother next rang – to ask him for £24,000 (about half a million rand), and then repeated her request the following week. “I called her and said ‘can you tell me what it’s for and I will happily send it over’.”

Already perturbed, Wood had another shock when he got a call from his mother to tell him she had “kidnapped” her husband (Wood’s stepfather, Brian Harness-Wood) from the Tokai Estate Health Care Centre, where he was in frail care.

“I had put Brian into the Tokai centre when I was last in South Africa, a few weeks previously. He had been suffering from dementia and it was decided he needed extra care.