UK court sentences two company directors to 11 years’ imprisonment for green investment fraud News
Image by Bishnu Sarangi from Pixabay
UK court sentences two company directors to 11 years’ imprisonment for green investment fraud

The UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) Wednesday announced Southwark Crown Court’s sentencing of two company directors to 11 years’ imprisonment on charges of conspiracy to defraud and misconduct in a green investment scheme.

Andrew Skeene and Omari Bowers, former directors of Global Forestry Investments, encouraged investors to invest in three Brazilian teak tree plantations. They falsely claimed that the investments were “secure, well-managed, ethical” and would protect the Amazon rainforest and support local communities.

The investment scheme defrauded more than 2,000 investors of their savings and pensions and collected approximately £37 million of investments. The SFO also revealed that the two men used the investments to enrich themselves. They collectively withdrew around £750,000 in cash from the investments and spent a further £2 million on retail, luxury and entertainment.

In May, the SFO secured the directors’ convictions by a jury trial in Southwark Crown Court for fraud and misconduct committed in the process of winding up the investment company.

Judge Jeffrey Pegden QC highlighted the “serious detrimental impact” of the scheme on investors, including some of them not being able to retire, resulting in their “prolonged distress and mental anguish.”

Over the rest of the year, the SFO will prosecute 18 defendants in six cases for alleged fraud valued at more than £500 million.

THIS DAY @ LAW

Bank of England granted political independence

On May 6, 1997, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown announced that the Bank of England would be granted political independence for the first time in the three-hundred year history of the Bank. This policy was statutized in the subsequent Bank of England Act of 1998 gave the Bank independent control of British monetary policy effective June 1, 1998. Read the Bank of England Act of 1998.

Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese laborers from US

On May 6, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States and prohibiting courts from bestowing US citizenship on Chinese. Connecticut Senator Joseph Hawley spoke out against the Act in these words: Let the proposed statue be read 100 years hence, dug out of the dust of ages and forgotten as it will be except for a line of sneer by some historian, and ask the young man not well read in the history of this country what was the reason for excluding these men and he would not be able to find it in the law. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its successors were abolished in 1943 at the insistence of President Franklin Roosevelt.