Sunday Times 2
Swiss banker dumps disabled elderly husband in India
View(s):By Ian Sparks
A wife who took her handicapped husband on a ‘holiday of a lifetime’ to India then dumped him there to save on care costs has been jailed for four years in Switzerland. The wealthy 65-year-old banker showed the wheelchair-bound 74-year-old videos of ‘palm-fringed beaches and luxury hotels’ to convince him to come on the trip.
The woman – who had been paying £6,000 a month in care bills – then took him to a poverty-stricken suburb of New Delhi and paid a family £1,500 a month to take him in.
She then jetted home alone to continue her life of luxury in Zurich, a court in Winterthur was told.
But nine months after the trip in January 2008, the husband died due to ‘lack of care and poor hygiene’ and his body was cremated and thrown into a river, it was heard.
The scam was exposed when her Indian ‘carers’ contacted the Swiss authorities to inform them the man had died. During the trial, the woman – who can not be named for legal reasons – insisted her acions had been in her husband’s best interests due to the ‘warm climate’ in India.
But a prosecutor told the court: ‘Her act was the utterly cynical disposal of an old and disabled person to save money.
‘She had even shown her husband videos and books on India to sell the trip to him as a luxurious holiday.
‘But instead he died alone in a strange land, without familiar faces around him and with no possibility of communication with his new carers.’
The woman was jailed for six months after an initial trial last year, but prosecutors appealed the sentence and she was jailed for four years this week for kidnapping.
© Daily Mail, London
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