Three people were on Thursday 27 May sentenced at Southwark Crown Court to over nine years in jail for their part in a £2.5m fraud using a registered charity as a front for their criminal activity.
Peter Sainsbury, Kirkvine Ellis and Nicholette Cort appeared at Southwark Crown Court earlier that month and were found guilty of a string of fraud and money laundering offences.
The jury heard how Sainsbury set up a charity called People’s Opportunity to Work Trust (POW Trust), which he claimed raised money for the rehabilitation of offenders just released from prison. The charity, which was set up in 1992, supposedly offered legal services and advice on getting them back into work.
Following an investigation by the MPS Fraud Squad in 2005, it was revealed that although this charity was registered – and supported by a number of high profile patrons – it undertook very little genuine business or charitable activity.
Some of the patrons, who assisted police with their investigation and have since withdrawn their support for the charity, include MPs, MEPs, actors, members of the clergy, peers and university professors.
Sainsbury, Ellis and Cort committed their fraud by using insiders from financial institutions and companies to identify victims, submitting false invoices for work they had not completed, amending cheques so they could pay them into their charity accounts and by applying for credit cards in other people’s names and running up thousands of pounds worth of debt.
They opened 40 bank accounts, some in the name of POW Trust and others in the names of subsidiaries of the charity – such as ‘P.O.W Investment Ltd’ and ‘P.O.W. Legal Services’. This variation of names made it easy for them to pay cheques and transfer funds into any of the accounts they chose. They also used two other charity names, one called ‘ALPS Forum’, which they claimed educated inner city children, and the other ‘Daily Meals Trust’, which was supposedly set up to deliver meals to the homeless. No children were ever educated and no meals were ever delivered.
Between 2002 and 2004, £2.5m was stolen from unsuspecting victims, put through the business accounts, transferred to associates’ accounts and withdrawn in cash or laundered abroad. Further financial enquiries revealed that two of the defendants, husband and wife Ellis and Cort, bought a villa in Spain with the proceeds of their lucrative fraud.
Sainsbury, the mastermind of the scam, was unable to hold the position of trustee for the charity POW Trust, as he was already a convicted fraudster. Instead, he took on the title of general secretary and tried to cover up the fraud by creating a complex array of returnable donation certificates and ‘loan notes’ said to have been agreed to by the victims. Evidence presented at court revealed that this was not the case and in fact the victims knew of no such agreements.
Trustee for the charity, Ellis, who organised for the stolen money to be laundered through Cort’s personal bank accounts claimed in his defence that the funds were going to be used to arrange a fundraising concert with acts such as Beyonce and Destiny’s Child headlining.
Detective Sergeant Richard Ward, from the Economic and Specialist Crime Command, said after the case: "These callous fraudsters had a total disregard for their victims, cruelly using a registered charity to defraud unsuspecting and often elderly victims of their savings.
"Instead of helping those who needed it most, the group behind this scam took substantial amounts of money for their own benefit.
"Sainsbury was without a doubt the mastermind of this scam and the harm he caused with his persistence in defrauding members of the public, public bodies and businesses was substantial – he has now been stopped"
Police will now be looking to confiscate any criminal proceeds and assets under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA).
