Real life 'Wolf Of Wall Street' corrupt City boss who remains on the run is ordered to pay back £64million after Ponzi-style scam

Daily Mail​

3 hours ago

A City boss compared to the Wolf Of Wall Street has been ordered to pay back £64million over his role in a gigantic Ponzi-style investment scam, prosecutors said.
Anthony Constantinou remains on the run after he fled the UK during his trial at London 's Southwark Crown Court in June 2023.
He was found guilty of seven counts of fraud by false representation, fraudulent training and money laundering and convicted in his absence to 14 years imprisonment.
Constantinou enjoyed a playboy lifestyle, driving a fleet of flash motors and riding around on a superbike branded the logo of his company, Capital World Markets (CWM).
The 41-year-old crook spent millions on sponsorship deals designed to make CWM appear successful and draw in potential clients.
He duped hundreds of investors out of a total of £70million between 2013 and 2015 while he ran Capital World Markets (CWM).
A spokesman for City of London Police said a confiscation order was made against him on Thursday for the sum of £64 million, which is payable within three months.
Police released photographs of some of the luxury vehicles Constantinou spent his fraudulent money on, including a Porsche, Range Rover and luxury motorbike.
They previously said he was thought to be in Turkey or Dubai after being stopped in Bulgaria with a fake Spanish passport.
CWM had high-profile sponsorship deals with sports events or teams including the Honda Moto GP, Chelsea Football Club, Wigan Warriors rugby league club, Cyclone Boxing Promotions and the London Boat Show.
The seven-week trial heard how Constantinou spent £2.5million of investors' money on his 'no expense spared' wedding on the Greek island of Santorini in September 2014, while his son's first birthday party a few days earlier cost more than £70,000.
More than £470,000 was paid for private jet hire to fly him and his associates to Moto GP races across Europe as well as a return flight to Nice for a 150,000-euro five-day yacht cruise around the Mediterranean to Monaco.
The firm paid £200,000 a quarter to rent 'plush' offices in the City's Heron Tower, while nearly £600,000 was spent on just six months' rent of his large home in Hampstead, north-west London, where his luxury cars were parked in the drive.
Promised returns of 60 per cent each year on risk-free foreign exchange (FX) markets, a total of 312 investors trusted their money to CWM.
Some were professionals but most were individuals who handed over their life savings or pension pots, with a large number of Gurkhas paying into the scheme, said prosecutor David Durose KC.
Constantinou denied wrongdoing but was found guilty of one count of fraud, two counts of fraudulent trading and four counts of money laundering and sentenced to 14 years in prison in his absence.
Adrian Foster, of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), said: 'This was a callous scam targeting members of the public. Many people lost their hard-earned money because of Constantinou's greed and false promises in this fake investment scheme.
'We continue to pursue the proceeds of crime robustly with the City of London Police, where we identify available assets to disrupt and deter large-scale frauds like this case.
'In the last five years, over £478million has been recovered from CPS obtained confiscation orders, ensuring that thousands of convicted criminals cannot profit from their offending. £95 million of that amount has been returned to victims of crime, by way of compensation.'
Constantinou has been photographed socialising with Princess Beatrice and showing Princess Anne around his company premises after agreeing to sponsor the London Boat Show in 2015.
Constantinou was previously jailed for a year at the Old Bailey in 2016 after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two women during after-work drinks.
One of the victims described how the parties were just like the raucous scenes depicted in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf Of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as rogue New York trader Jordan Belfort.
The court heard that in October 2014, Constantinou pushed a woman up against the frosted glass of the reception area and went on to grope and kissed her against her will.
Then in February 2015, he assaulted another woman during drinks after a business meeting.
During the meeting, Constantinou threw her mobile against a wall and told her: 'Don't answer phones in my meeting.'
Constantinou was three years old when his fashion tycoon father Aristos was gunned down in his Bishop's Avenue mansion in 1985.
The unsolved case was dubbed the 'Silver Bullet Murder' due to the six nickel-jacketed bullets that ended Aristos's rags-to-riches life.
One of Constantinou's investors spoke to Mail Online in 2023 about his boss' appetite for bad behaviour.
The man, who first met Constantinou in 2014, said: 'He put out this image of himself as being hyper successful and I think essentially that's what I fell for.
'Initially I had dismissed the whole thing as too good to be true but I saw so much evidence of it being genuine that I convinced myself that it was. I should have listened to my gut.
'I thought essentially if this is a scam he wouldn't have gone to this much effort. It was very elaborate and there were a lot of people involved.
'The clever thing he did was he did actually have a properly regulated FX business in London but he ran the Ponzi alongside it - that was quite clever.
'So seeing the office, his house, the chauffeur driven Rolls Royce he got around in and all these sponsorship deals - it did all look very genuine.
'If Chelsea are being sponsored by them and he's meeting showing Princess Anne and showing her round the office it feels legit.'
After a few meetings with Constantinou and his CWM colleagues in 2014, it was agreed that the businessman would invest £140,000 and work with the company to set up a Dubai base.
It was while working alongside Constantinou in his 'Wolf of Wall Street' style trading floor, that he saw how difficult, volatile and untrustworthy the fraudster could be.
He continued: 'Every single business meeting - and I mean every single one - he would force everyone in the meeting to drink.
'It was always the same, Grey Goose vodka mixed with orange and cranberry juice and he'd force everyone to stay and get drunk.
'The drinking would start from 2pm in the afternoon and go on until 10 or 11 at night and it was every single meeting, every day.
'He was like a spoiled child king. Nobody could leave these sessions or he'd have a tantrum and lose his s***.
'A few hours in he'd be absolutely wasted, so he'd be doing stupid, weird stuff like throwing things across the office to annoy people or smashing doors. He was a pretty nasty piece of work.'
According to the investor, opting out of Constantinou's demands wasn't a choice as his paranoid, controlling and spiteful nature leaked into the entourage of underlings he kept at his heels.
He said: 'His entourage was Stalin-esque. He kept his circle close and everyone just did as he said for fear of reprisals.
'He was a moody child who would fly off the handle for basically any reason. You always had to tell him what he wanted to hear.
'He had a Telegram group where he sent good morning messages. He expected every single person to reply with either a thumbs up emoji or a muscle emoji - if you didn't, he would lose his s***.
'One of his assistants would then phone you up and say: 'Listen, you have to reply to him in the Telegram group, he's going mad and smashing stuff up in the office.'