Corrupt financiers who defrauded small businesses of millions were described by the sentencing judge in court this week as “utterly corrupt…rapacious, greedy people”.
Judge Beddoe sentenced two former HBoS employees to 11 years and four and a half years, their two accomplices who ran a consultancy for small businesses to 15 years and 10 years, and two others to three and a half years each for money laundering.
Lloyds Banking Group, which bought HBoS after the frauds had taken place, claims it is also a victim of the crime.
The scam took place between 2002 and 2007. Small businesses were classified “high risk” by HBoS and referred to a consultancy, Quayside Corporate Services, as a condition of the bank’s continued support. In return the consultancy provided the bankers with luxury holidays, gifts and prostitutes. The consultancy then made inflated cases for further loans from HBoS and siphoned money and assets from the businesses.
Speaking in R v Mills at Southwark Crown Court on 2 February, Judge Beddoe said the case “primarily involves an utterly corrupt senior bank manager letting rapacious, greedy people get their hands on a vast amount of HBoS’s money and their tentacles into the businesses of ordinary decent people…and letting them rip apart those businesses, without a thought for the lives and livelihoods of those whom their actions affected, in order to satisfy their voracious desire for money and the trappings and show of wealth.”
He continued: “Lives of investors, employers and employees have been prejudiced and in some instances ruined by your behaviour. People have not only lost money but in some instances their homes, their families, and their friends. Some who would have expected to be comfortable in retirement were left cheated, defeated and penniless.”
To one of the defendants, LS, he said: “You sold your soul. For sex, for luxury trips with and without your wife; for bling and for swank.”
Jeffrey Davidson, managing director of Honeycomb Forensic Accounting, who acted for Jonathan Cohen, the only defendant to be acquitted, said: "This was a monumental breach of trust and the sentencing clearly reflects this. No account was taken of the ages of the crooks, two of whom were over 70, because of the severity of their criminal conduct.”
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