A further man, Damien Rodney Smith, the son of one of those sentenced today, has pleaded guilty and will be sentenced at a later date.
The UK’s Serious Fraud Office, which led the investigation, said two of those sentenced today, Brian O’Brien and Lynne D’Albertson (mother of Smith), led the operation which centred around Secure Trade & Title Ltd (STT) – a UK-based company which acted as a “supposedly secure payment funnel” for share purchases.
O’Brien, who has lived in Europe (UK, Spain and Ireland) for around 20 years, was described as “the brains behind the scheme”. In addition to STT, he also controlled a boiler room in Spain called Black & White Investments SL, and later its replacement company, Cardinal Securities SL, as well as another boiler room, DML in Limerick, Ireland – all of which were responsible for making the majority of the fraudulent investments.
Essentially, investors were offered investments in two main companies – Golden Dynasty Resources Ltd, an oil and gas exploration company in Canada and Claimtracker Ltd, a UK technology company. Both were real companies which were in need of raising capital quickly and, while they knew he was selling shares, were unaware of the scam orchestrated by O’Brien.
While the shares were real, they were being sold at hugely inflated prices and the deals were being sent via STT where money was being siphoned off into an account set up by O’Brien and D’Albertson.
Meanwhile the last man sentenced, James Pye, was a senior manager at the Black & White office in Barcelona, responsible for making sales and supervising a team of sales people. Black & White closed in 2005 following a warning from the UK’s Financial Services Association but Pye later bought Cardinal Securities SL with help from O’Brien.
The SFO said, as an example of the scale to which the fraud was operating, over a three month period following Cardinal’s start up in January 2006, the company’s sales staff persuaded over 40 investors to part with more than £300,000.
The three sentenced today, O’Brien, D’Albertson and Pye, were given total prison terms of 16 and a half years, with O’Brien receiving eight years, D’Albertson receiving four and a half years and Pye receiving four years.
The SFO said Smith, will be sentenced in May and added that confiscation and compensation proceedings are provisionally arranged to commence against all four defendants on 8 October.
