A rogue landlord has been jailed after receiving £17,000 in council tax benefit and Jobseeker’s Allowance over a two year period whilst taking a regular income from his family property business.

Nilendu Das, 45, was able to go on expensive holidays and send his son to private school while falsely claiming benefits and forcing tenants to live in squalor. Tenants at the houses he owned in Sheffield - in areas including Hunter’s Bar, Sharrow and Crookes - had to endure mouldy walls, broken doors and lack of insulation.

Robert Sandford, prosecuting, said: “On an application for a credit card he said he earned £42,000 a year as a professional landlord. Accounts show private school payments for his son.”

Das, of Carter Knowle Avenue, Carter Knowle, admitted two counts of fraud and was sentenced to 26 weeks in jail.

Judge Robert Moore said: “For two years you had a comfortable life with your parents’ money and got an extra £17,731 in public money. This was greed, not need.”

The father-of-two is not only awaiting further sentence at Sheffield Magistrates’ Court for four failures to comply with improvement notices, and harassing a former tenant on Neill Road in Hunter’s Bar (charges he admitted in August) but is also serving a suspended prison sentence for changing the locks at the flat of another tenant, on Cemetery Road in Sharrow, who had complained his home was unsafe.