Rastamouse creator sentenced for £8,000 benefit fraud
The creator of the children’s TV character Rastamouse has been ordered to do community service for benefit fraud, after the judge’s daughter said the author should not be jailed.
Michael De Souza, 64, the writer of the popular CBeebies animated stop-motion show about the leader of a crime-fighting reggae band, wrongly claimed £3,581.90 in jobseeker’s allowance and £5,186.12 in housing benefit in 2017.
He received the payments while failing to declare his income from writing, Southwark crown court in London heard. De Souza is best known for Rastamouse, a 52-episode show about the Da Easy Crew band, who solve crimes and catch criminals in Mouseland.
After De Souza admitted the fraud, the judge, Christopher Hehir, said: “Not even Da Easy Crew can get him out of this one.”
Sentencing the defendant to 160 hours of community service, Hehir took the unusual step of telling the court that his daughter had urged him not imprison De Souza.
He said: “I’ve got young children and I used to be a fan of Rastamouse. I did tell my eight-year-old daughter, who was a big fan when she was younger, that Mr De Souza was appearing before me, and she wasn’t keen on a custodial sentence … For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t usually run sentences past my young children.
“It is a great shame that a man of your undoubted talents, which I’ve been able to observe for myself through the medium of the TV show Rastamouse, finds himself before the crown court for a matter of this sort.”
De Souza, who left Trinidad in 1960 as a five-year-old to join his parents in the UK, created Rastamouse in 2003. His books were turned into a CBeebies show in 2011, with the main character voiced by the TV presenter Reggie Yates.
De Souza, from west London, admitted two charges of dishonestly failing to notify a change in circumstances between December 2016 and December 2017. He said he had not really faced up to his benefit fraud because his writing was such an irregular source of income.
The biographical information on his books says that he previously spent 15 years teaching swimming and working with children, and it was this that inspired him to write.
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