A Portuguese con artist who duped a Dutch shipping company out of €100 million has been sentenced in London to 14 years in prison.
Luis Nobre posed as a millionaire London trader, managed to persuade the Dutch company Allseas SA, which was seeing to raise capital to build a ship, to transfer €100 million into his direct control.
Nobre claimed he could get returns of 1,200% a year by using the Pope's secret trading platform when in reality he was one of a gang of fraudsters, led by Marek Rejniak, posing as international financiers to dupe the Dutch shipping company into handing over vast sums.
Allseas handed over their money on the promise the form could double its investment within 30 days and would receive €1.2 billion within three years. Idiotically, the board agreed the deal.
The 49-year-old Nobre, living in Wembley, passed himself off as a top financier with links to the Vatican via the Spanish royal family. He was but a fraudster and was found guilty of the 2011 con trick.
The jury heard how Nobre lived at the five-star Landmark Hotel in Marylebone while he was grooming Allseas SA, before fleeing abroad and leaving his girlfriend Victoria Weir and their newborn baby with a £130,000 hotel bill.
Nobre was taken arrested at Heathrow Airport in December 2011 and police found fake documents relating to bank accounts that showed balances of billions of dollars.
The Portuguese national was released on bail and then re-arrested in May 2012.
The con artist spent millions on a fabulous lifestyle of five-star hotels, private security, concierge services, clothing and hairdressing, according to the police who recovered €88 million which was returned to a grateful Dutch board of directors. In fact Barclays, suspecting the money to be the procedes of crime, froze the account with €88 million remaining in it.
He was joined by co-defendant, London based solicitor Buddika Kadurugamuaw, 46, who helped launder £111,400 in cash.
Kadurugamuwa was cleared of one count of being concerned in a money laundering arrangement but convicted of transferring criminal property. She had originally denied both counts. A third defendant, Nadeem Khan, 54, died of a heart attack before the trial commenced.
Marek Rejniak is still on the run.
