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Six members of staff at an award-winning firm of London agents were hauled up before court after operating a scam which, it was claimed, was company policy.

Employees at the Maida Vale branch of Greene and Co – the firm made famous when it starred in a fly-on-the-wall TV documentary a few years ago – operated a car parking permit fraud by using bogus addresses.

The fraud saved their firm thousands of pounds and denied the local council income.

All but one of the staff at Greene & Co claimed they lived in Westminster to gain resident parking permits when in fact they lived as far away as Bushey and Enfield in Hertfordshire.

Westminster Council’s fraud investigations manager, Steve Barry, said the matter started with an anonymous tip-off that employee Ben Curtis wasn’t living at the address matching his permit.

“One of my staff went round to the address and found the property was being refurbished and no one could possibly be living there,” he said. “He went to the estate agent, found Ben Curtis and took the badge from him.

“We then decided to put all the Greene and Co employees into the database and found that six of the seven employees claimed to be residents in Westminster but they all had addresses elsewhere.

“We have had problems with estate agents in the past but it’s unusual to find so many staff in one branch guilty. Nearly all of the staff from the branch were doing it.”

Curtis, of Winchmore Hill in north London, pleaded guilty and was fined £700 plus £450 costs and £15 victim surcharge.

Ealing resident Ed Bloom, Mill Hill resident Sarah Webber and Bushey resident Matthew Sheldon were also fined after pleading guilty.

Two employees, Daniel Ginsburg, of Edgware, and Simon Cole, of Southgate, initially pleaded not guilty but changed their plea to guilty when they appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court last week.

Cole, assistant manager of the branch, was ordered to pay a total of £2,285, and Ginsburg was told to pay £1,315.

The six had used the addresses of flats they were selling to apply for residents’ parking permits, so that they could avoid having to pay and display.

Some of the agents claimed in mitigation that what they were doing was a company policy and they were effectively just following “an edict from on high”.

Prosecutor Nicholas Dunham said: “Mitigation was advanced that there was an edict from on high that that’s just what you did, because it saved a lot of money for Greene and Co.”

Defence lawyer David Sonn admitted: “False statements were made in order to get a permit and that was done for the financial advantage of the company.”

Of the alleged company policy, Mr Sonn said: “The court can draw its own inference from the fact that six people from the same company all pleaded guilty to the same offence.”

Greene & Co has won a clutch of awards for its customer service and has appeared in the Sunday Times Best Places to Work list.

David Pollock, managing director of Greene & Co, said: “This matter is part of an ongoing internal review. Therefore the company does not wish to comment further except to say that it remains committed to providing an award-winning customer service.”

On its website, Greene & Co describes itself as “totally honest and transparent”. Pollock has recently written a book called 101 Things Your Estate Agent Should Tell You When Buying or Selling a Property.

There are at least two other live investigations into estate agents practising the same scam in Westminster alone. The fraud has been described as being widespread among London agents.

Westminster Council estimates that using residents’ parking permits instead of pay-and-display while taking clients to viewings could save agents £10,000 per year.