The three men, father Tomas Wilmot, who was sentenced to nine years imprisonment, and his sons Kevin and Christopher who were each given five years, were handed their sentence today at a UK Crown Court in the London borough of Southwark. The sentences were passed following the individuals’ convictions on four offences of conspiracy to defraud, resulting in £14m of losses.
According to a statement from UK financial regulator, the Financial Services Authority, the Wilmots controlled a syndicate of boiler rooms that defrauded an estimated 1,700 investors of £27.5m in total. The FSA added that many of these victims were elderly and, in some cases, suffering from serious illnesses.
The court found that the three Wilmots conspired to acquire, transfer and sell millions of low value, worthless and sometimes non-existent shares to victims in the UK.
Sentencing, Judge Leonard QC said: “You ran a highly successful enterprise. You deprived many individual investors of substantial amounts of money; for some that was money they could not afford to give up. It was a staggering amount of £14m.
“You’ve sailed so close to the wind in your commercial enterprises it was not a surprise the FSA investigated you.
“[Speaking to Kevin and Christopher Wilmot] Both of you played an important role including the mechanics of sending documents to give false comfort to investors. Tomas Wilmot said he could not do it alone, and he did not.”
The investigation began in July 2008 after searches in relation to another boiler room scam in late 2007 implicated the Wilmots. In May 2009, 93 FSA and City of London Police investigators carried out a series of coordinated searches at the home addresses of the suspects in Guilford and Hirsham and at their office in Bramley, Surrey. During the raids 48 digital items (such as computer hard drives and other storage devices) were seized along with 67,000 documents, said the FSA.
The investigation revealed that approximately £14m was transferred out of five UK accounts to offshore banks in Malta, Lithuania and Spain. It also revealed that, while the majority of the 16 boiler rooms were based in Spain, the back office accounts and companies used in the operations were from Malta, Italy, Slovakia, Lithuania, Austria, Andorra, Brazil, Belize, Dubai and a number of Caribbean Islands.
Tracey McDermott, the FSA’s acting director of enforcement, said: “This was a highly sophisticated scam that made use of offshore structures to launder the funds, put distance between the Wilmots and the boiler rooms, and ultimately disguise the nature of the business. That meant that what started out as a UK-based FSA investigation had to evolve into a joint, then global, operation to bring the perpetrators to justice.
“The individuals convicted today sought to cloak their activities within an aura of respectability to deceive investors, many of whom were vulnerable or elderly. They are, however, nothing more than cold-hearted criminals who profited from stealing other people’s money.”
