Merseyside Police said an initial delve into his finances showed a high level of personal debt and multiple missed payments on the vehicle’s finance.<\/p>\n
Text messages recovered from his mobile phone also showed him discussing how to get rid of the vehicle \u2013 including getting the car written off – in the months before the reported incident.<\/p>\n
Daniel Travers, defending, said Owen’s plan was “frighteningly stupid for a man ostensibly reasonably well educated and intelligent”.<\/p>\n
He said Owen, who had no previous convictions and came from a “successful, stable family”, had been described by his father as a Walter Mitty character who “lives in a fantasy world”.<\/p>\n
Travers said Owen “never anticipated” the damage that would be done to Jaguar Land Rover by the negative publicity resulting from his story.<\/p>\n
Sentencing Owen, Judge Ian Unsworth KC told him: “You set in train a course of conduct which caused a significant police traffic operation to be deployed, undoubted alarm to the public and very substantial loss and disruption to others.”<\/p>\n
The judge said police officers placed themselves in danger because they believed they were dealing with a genuine emergency.<\/p>\n
“You, meanwhile, sought to profit from a lie,” he added.<\/p>\n
Owen was also disqualified from driving for five years and until an extended driving test has been passed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Merseyside Police said an initial delve into his finances showed a high level of personal debt and multiple…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":726354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-726353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/726354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}