London Mayor Sadiq Khan is attempting to block the pension of a rapist former Metropolitan Police officer, said to be £10,000 per year, his office said.
Ex-Pc Adam Provan was last week jailed for 16 years for a series of rapes spanning eight years, including an attack on a female police officer and a 16-year-old girl.
Former officers’ pensions can only normally be blocked if the offending has been carried out in connection to their police service.
Following a trial at Wood Green Crown Court, Provan, 44, from Newmarket in Suffolk, was found guilty of a total of eight rapes against the two women and jailed for 16 years with a further eight years on extended licence.
His predatory behaviour dated back to the 1990s and went unchecked until Lauren Taylor came forward in 2016 to report she had been twice raped by him.
A spokesman for Mr Khan’s office said: “Following the conviction of Adam Provan for these truly horrendous crimes, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac) are pursuing forfeiture of this former officer’s pension.”
Mopac started the pension forfeiture process following the ex-officer’s first conviction, but this had to be paused due to the appeal and retrial.
It will now seek permission from the Home Secretary to forfeit Provan’s pension, and if successful, will decide how much of the pension should be removed.
But Mr Khan does not have the powers to strip him of the entirety of his pension, and the former officer will keep at least 35% which he contributed himself.
I remember holding on to the tree. I was kind of hugging the tree like emotional support, pretended I was anywhere else in the world but back there.— Lauren Taylor
Mr Khan made a similar bid to block the £22,000 a year pension of serial rapist David Carrick who admitted 49 offences against a dozen women.
Home Office guidance states pension forfeiture can only be applied for when an officer has a conviction “committed in connection with their service as a member of a police force” and the offence has been certified by the Home Secretary as “liable to lead to a serious loss of confidence in the public service” or “gravely injurious to the interests of the state”.
Such applications are usually made after a police officer has committed a crime while on duty.
In 2016, Ms Taylor came forward to say Provan raped her on a blind date when she was 16 in 2010.
Between 2003 and 2005, he also repeatedly raped a female police officer and terrorised her so she feared for her life.
Prosecutors at his trial said Provan was obsessed with young women, had viewed teenage pornography and collected more than 700 female contacts on his mobile phone.
Ms Taylor, now 29, had agreed to go to the cinema with Provan after he lied about his age, saying he was 22, and said he was a police officer.
Instead, Provan, then 31, took her to the woods, where he had sex with her even though she repeatedly told him no.
Speaking of her ordeal in an interview with the PA news agency after waiving her right to anonymity, she said: “Basically he raped me. I remember holding on to the tree. I was kind of hugging the tree like emotional support, pretended I was anywhere else in the world but back there. I remember it can’t have been long, but it felt like a long time.”
