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His friends know him simply as 'Shab'. The insurance industry, however, knows him as bad news because 33-year-old Mohammed Shabir Hussain has enjoyed extraordinary success in winning huge compensation payments for victims of car accidents.

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The three of them were apparently personally involved in 14 car accidents from 1997 to 2001. They made compensation claims on all of them, some for vehicle write-offs. Five of these were probed by fraud investigators working on behalf of insurance companies, but no charges were brought.

All of that happened before the brothers set up Premier. Now one insurance company has told Financial Mail that it is looking into personal injury claims submitted on behalf of Premier clients relating to a further 13 separate car accidents for which a total payout of more than £100,000 is being sought.

We sent two heavily disguised local men to visit a couple of Premier's offices. They told the company they had been in an accident a few months before. They were down on their luck and wanted to make a bit extra out of the claim.

Premier's employee - on a business card he called himself Mohammed S - then asked how many passengers were in the car, saying they should all get in touch to secure money for personal injury compensation.

He asked for no evidence of the crash, but instead immediately filed the claims form and began arranging for medicals to be conducted. Shabir, who drives round his home town of Bradford in a £30,000 yellow Hummer 4x4, has never faced any fraud charges. Nor have his brothers.

Shokat insisted: 'We don't run a dodgy business.' He said the firm had never been involved in illegal activity, nor had it ever been prosecuted. He denied all knowledge of the various crashes in which he and his brothers were said to have been involved and said that if any of the company's employees had behaved inappropriately they would be sacked.

Our investigation follows Financial Mail's probe last year into the dangers of staged accidents, which revealed that insurance fraud from such set-ups had been happening in the UK for more than a decade.

The scams started in the North-West and spread throughout Britain, taking on a number of forms. For example, some gangs pay a bus or coach driver to crash into other vehicles. False compensation forms are then submitted, claiming that the bus or coach was full of passengers who were all injured.

Alternatively, gang members disconnect the brake lights on their vehicle and then brake sharply in moving traffic once a victim is positioned behind. Others pull on to roundabouts and brake sharply. The criminals then claim for injuries such as whiplash suffered by fictitious passengers, as well as seeking compensation for loss of earnings and damage to the vehicle.

Richard Davies, deputy chairman of the Insurance Fraud Bureau and fraud risk manager at insurer Axa, said: 'We are now seeing accidents where vulnerable groups are being targeted.

Between 1999 and 2005 there had been around 22,500 staged accidents, he said. Davies added that without more action to combat the crime there would be an equal number in the next 18 months.

Organised car insurance fraud costs the industry £200m a year and is believed to inflate the cost of premiums by five% - adding about £40 to the cost of an average comprehensive policy.

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