It was meant to give sick and dying men recompense for the irreparable damage to their health caused by years of mining coal. Yet the legacy of the world’s biggest private injury compensation scheme is the number of opulent houses, private jets and luxury cars purchased with the profits of the solicitors who handled their claims.

What began as a casual inquiry by The Times into the complex administration of the coal health scheme developed into a lengthy investigation producing a series of incriminating revelations whose ripples are felt to this day.

In June 2005 this newspaper ran the first article detailing the close financial relationship between individuals at the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM) and solicitors’ firms – including Beresfords – handling thousands of claims passed to them by the union. A claims-handling company wholly owned by the union, Vendside, had been passing claims to selected law firms.

The firm would process each claim, receiving a fixed fee from the Government for its work, but would also deduct a sum of money from the compensation awarded to the miner, to be paid back to Vendside. A further complication arose when The Times discovered that some solicitors, in addition to passing the “Vendside fee” to the How the Times broke the story in 2005 detailing the close financial relationship between solicitors’ firms and individuals at the Union of Democratic Mineworkers union, were making a separate payment per claim to a company owned by a union employee.

On the day the story was published, a criminal inquiry was launched. A month later, the Law Society announced that – in the largest inquiry into solicitors’ conduct in its history – it was investigating more than 30 law firms. During the same month, the Government ordered an independent inquiry into the running of its compensation scheme and the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) took control of the criminal investigation. In November, the SFO ordered dawn raids on the UDM headquarters and the homes of the union’s two senior officials. The inquiry has now been running for three years and four months. It is still active.

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