IT would be laughable if it were not such a blatant abuse of the law and public money - that scrounging Romanian gypsy Maria Nistor, topping up her state benefits with £20 an hour from illegal begging on the London Underground, is actually an undercover agent of the law.

Twice this woman was in court last week for begging on the Tube and twice she was let off with a slap-on-the-wrist.

Yet she and her family have been living rent free in a £130,000 four-bedroom house and drawing £235 a fortnight in benefits.

At the same time her husband was fraudulently drawing welfare while also working for a wage and they were driving their neighbours to despair with their anti-social behaviour.

But, if this is yet one more instance of how foreign undesirables get the red carpet treatment in soft-touch Britain, how much more outrageous it is to learn that Nistor and family are not just another lot of sob-story asylum seekers - 60,000 of who, we now learn, are 'missing' in Britain.

They are, in fact, straightforward illegal immigrants who were given false asylum-seeker papers by the Home Office so they could inform on other members of their shady community?

Some reward we have received for their services as spies for a government that is tough on crime and the causes of crime.

What we got was a couple milking the welfare system for all its worth, indulging in benefit fraud, living free in a luxury home that most taxpayers cannot afford, being neighbours from hell, begging and drawing three times as much than most working folk get in their hard-earned wages and carping that there's not a free telly supplied.

Perhaps our Home Secretary will explain the value of all this - and why the Nistors and their ilk who are manifest all over London are not on the first jet back to Romania.

Meantime, they have done a runner and joined the 'missing.'

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.