An Essex businessman behind a £226m luxury Caribbean holiday homes fraud in which thousands of people lost their life savings and pensions has been sentenced to a 12-year term after a judge described him as running a “gigantic Ponzi scheme”.
David Ames, 70, was convicted last month at Southwark crown court on two counts of fraud by abuse of position, after a Serious Fraud Office investigation found he had deceived more than 8,000 UK investors in the Harlequin Group, a hotel and resorts development venture, using celebrity endorsements to lure people in.
Several thousand victims lost pensions and life savings to the fraud, while Ames enriched himself and his family by £6.2m, the court had heard.
Sentencing him, the judge, Christopher Hehir, described Ames as a “slick salesman and thoroughly dishonest with it”. He told him he was “a menace to anybody unfortunate enough to do business with you”. The harm he had inflicted “was immense” and his offending was “protracted and sophisticated and claimed a large number of victims”. He had “lied to and misled” both his employees and investors.
While he recognised that it was genuine scheme at the outset, only becoming criminal when Ames should have recognised investors were exposed to risk, the judge said the business model was “fundamentally flawed” and run under Ames’s “disastrous and dishonest stewardship”.
He sentenced Ames to nine years on the first count and three years on the second to run…
