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Old 07-28-2010, 02:39 AM
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Default Skint trucker who 'sold' Ritz for £250 million jailed

Skint trucker who 'sold' Ritz for £250 million jailed

07-28-2010 02:02 AM

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Wed, 2010-07-28 10:00


Skint trucker who 'sold' Ritz for £250 million jailed


Skint trucker who 'sold' Ritz for £250 million jailed

Source: The Daily Mirror

A jobless conman was jailed yesterday for five years over an "elaborate and outrageous" scam to sell The Ritz.
Penniless lorry driver Anthony Lee, 49, duped property developer Terence Collins into thinking the famous hotel was up for grabs.
Lee said the building was being sold for £250million and received £1million as a downpayment.
Police say the conman then went on a £650,000 spree, including a Range Rover Vogue for his partner and a Med cruise. Lee carried out his scam after claiming that he was a close friend of the reclusive billionaire Barclay brothers who own the hotel in Central London.
But Sir Frederick and Sir David Barclay had never heard of him.
Judge Stephen Robbins told Lee: "You were found guilty by a jury of this elaborate and outrageous scam, purporting to sell The Ritz hotel, thereby obtaining £1million from your victim. This offence was compared to other fraudsters who tried to sell the Eiffel Tower, Brooklyn Bridge and Buckingham Palace."
Lee had posed as a high-flying speculator despite never having completed a deal in his life.
He told Mr Collins he had a contract to sell The Ritz for a "b a r g a i n " £250million - at least £350million less than its face value. His victim then sought the support of Dutch billionaire financier Marcel Boekhoorn who coughed up the £1million in December 2006.
Mr Collins told the Dutchman the Barclay brothers had "secretive reasons" for selling the hotel and a casino through a third party.
But the sale never happened and the money was never returned - though police recovered roughly £350,000 of it.
Lee, of Goole, East Yorks, claimed at the four-week trial the £1million was for a separate property deal he had with Mr Collins. The businessman told Southwark crown court in South London that he agreed to refer to the payment as an introductory fee for a deal in North Yorkshire "for accounting reasons".
Lee, an undischarged bankrupt who had a police caution for theft and was behind with his rent at the time of the scam, insisted during the trial this month he was just a "straight-talking Yorkshireman".
Judge Robbins told him: "This con or scam or sting, whatever term is used, was probably motivated by your mistaken belief that Terry Collins had deprived you of another potentially lucrative property deal and it may be that this offence was done out of revenge."
EIFFEL TOWER? YOURS FOR £50K
Fraudster Victor Lustig "flogged" the Eiffel Tower - for scrap metal.
In 1925, a businessman paid roughly £50,000 for the structure in Paris and a bribe to Lustig, who vanished with the cash.
Here, Scottish scammer Arthur Ferguson "sold" London landmarks Nelson's Column and Big Ben to gullible American tourists in the 1920s.
He fled to the US where he then "flogged" the White House for payments of $100,000 a year and was arrested for "selling" the Statue of Liberty.







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