A British court has convicted a naturalized St. Vincent and the Grenadines national, Dave Ames, concerning a GBP226 million (one British pound=US$1.21 cents) fraud.
Ames, the Britain-born former chairman of Harlequin, the company that owned the former Buccament Bay Resort on St. Vincent and the Grenadines, will be sentenced in September.
The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) successfully convicted Ames, who was behind the fraud involving celebrity-endorsed luxury resorts in the Caribbean, including Buccament Bay Resort, according to a press release issued here.
The FSO said a jury at Southwark Crown Court found Ames, 70, guilty of two counts of fraud by abuse of position. He had offered no evidence in his defense.
An SFO investigation uncovered how Ames deceived over 8,000 United Kingdom investors in the Harlequin Group, a hotel and resorts development venture. The statement said victims were led to believe they had a secure investment in a property whereas, in reality, Harlequin Group was never operating as promised.
The business model relied upon investors paying a 30 percent deposit to purchase an unbuilt villa or hotel room, half of which went toward fees for Harlequin and relevant salespeople, while Harlequin put the remaining 15 percent toward construction.
Investors were fraudulently told that the building of the properties would be further funded by external financial backing. With no additional source of funding, three properties needed to be purchased to finance just one of the luxury accommodation units.
This led to the exponential expansion of the scheme, the diversion of investor money between resorts, and ultimately a funding shortfall of over GBP1.2 billion by 2012, seven years after Ames launched the scheme.
By this point, an expert accountant told Southwark Crown Court that investors were exposed to a near 100 percent risk of loss, which Ames did not contest.
The SFO investigation revealed that by the time it went into administration in 2013, Harlequin had sold around 9,000 property units to investors, with less than 200 ever actually being constructed.
Throughout the entire eight-year project, only 28 of over 8,000 investors ever completed a purchase, leaving well over 99 percent with no return on their investment. The Harlequin Group ultimately lost a total of 398 million pounds of investor funds.
Several thousand victims lost pensions and life savings to the fraud, while Ames enriched himself and his family by GBP 6.2 million.
Ames sacked associates who raised the alarm and, on one occasion, told colleagues that concerned investors needed “to be put in their place” to avoid attracting “bad press.”
In St. Vincent and the Grenadines, in June 2016, Ames fled the jurisdiction and returned to the UK after being summoned to court to answer for tax evasion and theft charges.
He fled St. Vincent by boat two days after being summoned to appear in court in June. The prosecution withdrew the charges in 2018, saying that was the better option than having them dismissed by the court.
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