A predatory Indian taxi driver has avoided jail despite pleading guilty to 499 charges for offences including fraud, overcharging and assaulting his disabled passengers in Melbourne.
Jarnail Singh, 57, a driver with Australia’s largest taxi company, 13cabs, pleaded guilty in December and was sentenced to a two-year community corrections order and fined $20,000, a 60 Minutes investigation revealed.
Singh was also convicted of transporting four passengers in wheelchairs instead of the legal limit of two, drink driving, and failing to secure the wheelchairs, and sentencing magistrate Kieran Gilligan told the program the law should be changed to allow taxi drivers to be jailed more easily.
CCTV footage showed Singh ripping off his disabled passengers, striking them and berating them, and Victoria Police said his crimes only came to light after he was caught drink-driving on the job.
Lead investigator, Senior Constable Tim Schnepf, said the first clip he reviewed showed Singh drinking beer as his passengers in wheelchairs rolled around the taxi due to not being properly restrained.
“Day in, day out he just didn’t secure the wheelchairs, he didn’t apply the brakes, [he subjected his passengers to] multiple assaults, he was drinking whilst he was driving. It was just unbelievable. How can someone treat another human being like this?” Schnepf said.
Singh was also regularly defrauding the taxpayer-subsidised taxi travel accounts of his disabled passengers.
“He was activating their accounts whilst he had no passengers in the car, he was overcharging them by starting the meter early, or he was not turning the meter off when he was dropping them off,” Schnepf said.
The mother of one of Singh’s victims said her son Liam had been treated like an animal, and that more needed to be done to stop criminal taxi drivers from preying on the disabled.
“I have one docket of Singh’s which says Liam was taken from North Dandenong to North Dandenong. I don’t think Liam’s ever been to North Dandenong,” she said.
In January an Indian taxi driver was jailed for sexually assaulting a passenger in Hobart, and a month before that an Indian driver was locked up for sexually assaulting a passenger in Melbourne and stealing her engagement ring.
Header image: Left, right, Singh caught on CCTV (60 Minutes).
