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OVER PHONE:Police. What's your emergency?

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..we explore for the first time their investigations...

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They were clever, and they're dangerous.

CHAIRMAN:We're proud to announce that Harlequin Hotels and Resorts

is a five-star brand, has been officially launched,

and the fact that Buccament Bay will open on time.

Buying a luxurious property abroad in the sun

is probably on everyone's bucket list,

but that dream can become a nightmare.

Harlequin was the biggest investment scandal

in terms of investment schemes gone wrong

that's ever happened in the UK.

He'd received £400 million.

Exactly how did he spend that,

and was it a fraud or was he a poor businessman?

I'd lost a lot of money - £150,000.

It's the opposite of winning the lottery.

You check your numbers and you think,

"No, this can't be me. This isn't happening to me."

There is an awful lot of dogged investigation work

involving vast amounts of data.

So, when you start to say, "Well, where has all this money gone?"

They funded the lifestyle of a rogue Irish builder,

and they paid for a private plane and for a marriage,

and they brought in sand from the Sahara.

What looks like a great deal on the surface

can disappear before your eyes.

You know, "He would sell ice to Eskimos," is the expression.

A Walter Mitty-type figure who has caused irreparable loss

to thousands of people.

I believe it was 8,000 investors,

and it's gone under the radar until now, really.

It wouldn't matter if you were probably going to die

in the next five years.

They were taking your money and putting you into the scheme.

CHAIRMAN:He's doing the work.

It's estimated the amount of fraud committed in the UK

more than doubled in 2023 to a staggering £2.3 billion.

My name is John McCarroll.

I was the case controller

for the SFO investigation into Harlequin.

The Serious Fraud Office is a non-ministerial department,

and our remit is basically look at the most complex cases

of fraud, bribery, and corruption that impact on the UK economy.

Harlequin as a potential case

first landed at the Serious Fraud Office in August 2011.

This one came to us initially

as a report from an Irish building firm

saying, "We've been doing some work for Harlequin

"and we think it's a fraud."

On initial investigation,

John and his team discover an intriguing anomaly.

It turned out that the Irish building firm

was actually in litigation with Harlequin,

and Harlequin was suing them for fraud,

which put a slightly different light on,

you know, "Are we going to take this case on or not?"

When the intelligence unit looked at it,

they were very much of the opinion that,

"This is a spat between company and contractors.

"It's nothing that we should get involved in."

You know, one company is just throwing mud at another.

So, we were sceptical.

Yet despite the scepticism,

something doesn't sit right in the team.

There are some big numbers here.

We had, in total, 20 to 30 people working on the case

over its entire lifespan.

Thankfully, one person,

who was our principal investigator, Ashraf,

was on the case from the very start and was there at the very end.

My name is Ashraf Isroliwala.

I am a principal investigator.

I've been at the Serious Fraud Office for 26 years.

A principal investigator basically leads the investigation.

When it first landed on my desk

and you looked at some of the initial documentation,

you could see it was a very, very big case.

The kind of information we had were principally statements

from various investors who'd made complaints to the FCA,

Action Fraud, and to our offices.

First steps involve peeling back the layers of the claims,

sniffing around Harlequin -

the company claiming fraud by the construction firm.

The chairman started legal proceedings in 2012.

There was then a second report

from a firm of accountants who had worked for Harlequin,

saying, "You should be aware this is a fraud."

So, whilst it was on our radar,

we were slightly wary of taking this on

and announcing a major investigation.

My name is Jack Gilbert.

I'm a journalist at Citywire.

We write about investments and investors around the world.

The building contractors did take the Harlequin chairman for a ride.

He put his faith in these guys and they did swindle him.

They took him for all he was worth.

He was paying huge sums of money to the building contractors,

in some cases £500,000 a week,

for works that weren't happening or weren't being done on time.

Basically, they were in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines,

thousands of miles from Essex.

They just had to pick up the phone and say, "We need £100,000,"

and Harlequin would send it to them

with no questions asked

and no financial oversight.

Funnily enough, the builders thought,

"Wow, this is a really easy gig,"

and so they were buying all sorts of things,

like racehorses and spending money on private jets and jewels,

and basically having a party on investor money.

The chairman of Harlequin was not sure why his resort

wasn't being built as quickly as he'd been promised,

so he dispatched his accountant from Essex

to go out and give some oversight and find out what was happening.

And I think the accountant got a little too close to the builders

because he turned up in paradise and they went, "This is fantastic.

"Come on over here. We just ask for money, it turns up.

"Let's go to Barbados for a holiday."

And he was subsequently sued, as well,

by the chairman for negligence.

There was a huge conflict of interest

because the accountants acted both for Harlequin

and also for the building contractors.

As a building fraud case is happening in Ireland,

the SFO let it play out and wait for the results.

But in the meantime,

they also dig deep into the chairman and his business, Harlequin.

Harlequin was founded in 2005.

It set itself up to be this grandiose hotel property scheme...

Their business model was to develop resorts

in a range of fantastic locations around the world -

Thailand, Brazil, Jamaica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

..where there'd be these luxurious resorts

which investors in the UK could invest in

and own an individual cabana or bungalow,

and then they'd get rental income and returns on that investment.

The chairman of Harlequin was an Essex businessman.

His background was principally in sales.

He'd done a lot of time-share sales, sold garden furniture,

all sorts of bits and pieces.

But ultimately, he was a salesman.

You know, "He would sell ice to Eskimos," is the expression.

CHAIRMAN:So, it's no good me standing here today

and saying to you, you know,

property in the Caribbean is £1 million

when the majority of people haven't got £1 million to invest.

So, what we've had to do is come up with a different type of model

that works for everybody, as I've mentioned earlier,

and how it works for our investor

is the fact that we make it very affordable to them.

At first glance, the company structure looks simple,

but it also looks like they're selling paradise

at a price that's too good to be true.

The chairman, he talked about helping the local economies

and it being great for investors.

It was all set up to be this win-win scheme.

CHAIRMAN:In Buccament Bay,

we're already, at this moment in time,

employing just under 1,000 local people building the resort,

and when the hotel is open,

we expect to be employing a further 1,500.

One man who was tempted was investor Steve Perriam.

I am semi-retired, working in the oil industry.

At the time of Harlequin,

I was married and had been for 25 years.

And we both had to sign the papers, and she will tell you,

even when she was signing the papers,

she had a bad feeling about it.

Harlequin was selling

multiple resorts in the Caribbean,

but only one was actually being built.

That was Buccament Bay in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

Do your own due diligence. Don't trust anybody.

If it's too good to be true, then it really is.

It's a fact of life.

So, Buccament Bay started receiving paying guests around 2010.

Seemed like a resort that all of us would want to go and stay at.

You saw blue seas and sand and sunshine and everything.

It was heavily focused on sports.

We had tennis academy, football academy.

Everything was available -

a range of different restaurants and bars, different themes.

And you had a variety of options for what sort of cabana you'd like -

would you like a one-bedroom one, a two-bedroom one, an apartment.

The world is your oyster. You could choose anything.

But the big issue for us was he'd sold 9,000 units

and only built 120 or 150 units.

There were some cabanas,

and it functioned as a very small resort,

but in the idea of the chairman of Harlequin,

this would have 2,000 cabanas.

It looked amazing from the pictures of the initial marketing,

but what actually came out

was nothing like what was initially sold.

In the end, what was built was on a much, much smaller scale.

By August 2013, over in Ireland,

the building firm that Harlequin pursued for fraud have to settle.

The judge ruled in Harlequin's favour

in a lawsuit against the contractors,

and they were ordered to pay £1.4 million.

But there's still a smell around Harlequin and the chairman.

The owner of the building firm enjoyed a lavish lifestyle

with investor money.

I think in total,

it came to about 20 million.

And, yes, the builders had been fraudulent.

That didn't mean Harlequin wasn't a fraud, as well.

The project was a complete shambles,

and things were completely out of control.

A lot of the problems did stem from the contractors.

By 2012, we'd spoken to enough individual investors

to see that there was something very, very wrong,

and we opened an investigation.

It wasn't a public investigation at that point.

Again, we were still information gathering.

The case in Ireland was closed,

but the chairman's litigation against his accountants

is still ongoing in the UK,

so the SFO doubled down on a covert investigation.

One of the problems we have is that

if you are opening an SFO investigation

with a big splash of publicity,

you could end up destroying what was a legitimate business.

You know, investors, banks would run a mile from a company

that was under investigation,

so we were very much in covert mode at that point.

What was certain, Harlequin wasn't all it seemed.

One look at the bank statements

and when you saw almost half a billion pounds

going through the bank account

with very little sort of end product,

this was really about individuals and the money that they lost,

and the only money coming in was their money.

It started ringing alarm bells,

and you immediately sort of thought, "Ponzi scheme."

The whole thing was a total mess.

It was a house of cards that came tumbling down.

But it was the people who were borrowing off family,

friends, bank loans, second mortgages,

they're the ones who really came out of it badly.

Harlequin, a holiday home company offering exclusive residences

for sale in the Caribbean and other exotic locations,

is under covert investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.

We actually went out and spoke to a couple of investors,

and it was only then that we started getting an idea

of how much money individual investors

had put into this business.

Thousands of small-scale investors could be at risk

if Harlequin's business model didn't stand up.

CHAIRMAN:What I'd like to explain to you now

is the success of the Harlequin model

and how it's come together over the last four years.

The chairman is very charismatic.

He was a good salesman.

He told a really good story, a very believable story,

which is why he managed to persuade people like me

who had sacrificed pension pots.

So, the way Harlequin worked

was investors had to pay up a 30% deposit

for one of the cabanas.

The rest of the 70% was through a mortgage or a loan,

which Harlequin provided.

And the sales pitch to the average investor

was basically, "It's going to cost you £1,000.

"That is it. That locks you into a contract."

CHAIRMAN:We ask our investor to raise 30% of the property price.

So, let's just say they invest £100,000,

what we look for them to do is to raise 30% of that,

which is £30,000.

What they were offering was a fractional ownership -

"However, the way we do it is, we'll build it in stages,

"so at the moment, all we need from you is £30,000."

But to get 30% deposits, I mean,

in some cases, it was £50,000, £100,000.

Not everyone's got this money lying around,

and there were cases where people took out mortgages

or remortgaged their house in order to invest in the scheme.

And here's the most attractive part of the deal -

Harlequin is going to pay the interest on that.

CHAIRMAN:To get a mortgage or a loan, let's say it's £250 a month.

Well, what we then do,

we actually pay that money back to the investor.

So, the time during the build,

it doesn't actually cost them a penny out of their own bank.

"And we'll pay it right the way through

"until the property is finished, at which point you own it.

"It's in our resort.

"We'll run it for a management fee.

"Everyone makes their money."

There was a return on investment.

They guaranteed 10%, so almost an exponential return.

It was an attractive proposition, but there was no rationale for it.

CHAIRMAN:For every, say, £100,

our investor gets 50 and the resort gets £50.

So, it's in the hotel's interest, as well as our investor,

to get as much money for that room as we can.

Trying to understand how the business operates is key.

If the chairman's vision is a legitimate business plan,

investigators had to tread carefully.

Our problem was the investigation was covert,

so it wasn't in the public domain.

We knew once we contacted investors,

there was the high probability that they will contact the company.

It's human nature to speak about it.

One investor did contact Harlequin as a result of that.

So the chairman knows he's under investigation,

possibly aware of what an SFO inquiry could uncover.

The chairman had no profile whatsoever.

You would think if you were running a multi-million-pound business

that had hotels and resorts all around the Caribbean,

they would have some sort of profile

other than stuff that was generated by themselves.

Perhaps there's a reason he's a ghost in the system.

He wasn't, however, a very good businessman.

He was twice bankrupt, and that's one reason

he wasn't on the paperwork here in the UK.

He was very much front and centre, the man running the operation.

He was the public face of Harlequin.

He would go out and do sales presentations, conferences.

But he wasn't on the books as a director.

If the chairman had been barred from serving as a company director,

how was he running Harlequin?

It is suspicious because he'd put his family,

so his wife and his children, forward as the company directors,

when in fact he was running the company.

And relying solely on many small individual investors' money

to fund his whole business is incredibly risky.

When we did the bank analysis, 95% of the money was investor money.

All that came into the bank account. That did ring alarm bells.

We hired an expert and he confirmed in order for this model to work,

you need external funding.

You can't just rely on investor funds.

The early investors who took out £30,000 as a loan,

they were getting the interest paid by Harlequin,

so that was fine.

The problem was it wasn't Harlequin's money.

It was other investors' money

that was being used to pay the interest.

The whole thing was a total mess.

Hardly any contracts were in place, as well.

It was a house of cards that came tumbling down.

It feels like it may be a Ponzi scheme.

The classic definition of a Ponzi

is where you are paying off the earlier investors in the scheme

with other investors' money.

Because you will run out of investors,

it will collapse inevitably.

Once we spoke to the individual investors on the ground

and we got the story about what they had been promised,

at that point, this seemed like a fraud.

Looking into investors,

it's clear the word has gone out to a lot of people.

The typical investor in Harlequin

was just an ordinary person in the UK.

It's your Joe Public.

It's people like myself, you.

It's not people who are extremely rich.

People who had moderate savings,

a little bit of money in a pension somewhere,

and a lot of cases, people putting all of their retirement savings

into the scheme, you know, hundreds of thousands of pounds.

People invested into it, just like I did,

on the basis of this aspiration, I suppose.

You were thinking,

"Well, I get these trips to the Caribbean,

"I get return on investment," and all the rest of it.

That's how so many people got sucked into it.

It was all very beautifully produced.

Glossy brochures with all of the finished artist impressions

of numerous resorts.

The marketing was very clever. It was very glossy.

There were a lot of celebrity endorsements.

So, they used big celebrity endorsements

to give it some validity.

And a lot of our investors did say, "We bought into this scheme

"because we saw certain individuals were endorsing it,

"and therefore it had to be legitimate."

So, for example, Buccament Bay had theBLEEPTennis Academy.

There were links toBLEEPFootball Club.

They would take out players and have a training camp there.

So, you as an investor, you'd get a chance to go out

and your family could play football with international footballers.

It was very convincing.

The money I had, it was in a pension pot.

It wasn't like you could touch the money.

It was somewhere ethereal, almost.

And the rules at that time

were very different to how they are today.

You just get carried away with the hyperbole

and the images and the Caribbean

and the weather, and all the rest of it.

To market the project,

the chairman relied on so-called investment professionals.

Crucially, the way he got the message out

was through a network of independent financial advisers,

or IFAs, because he legitimately said,

"I'm a twice-bankrupt double glazing salesman from Essex.

"No-one's going to give me the time of day.

"But if I get financial advisers

"who are professionals to sell it to their clients,

"I will do much better."

So, you had a small minority of unscrupulous financial advisers

who were selling the Harlequin investments

in self-invested personal pension - SIPP - pension products.

The way it should work is when you sell a product,

you should get a proportion of your commission

during the contract period.

So, the IFA should get 10% at the beginning,

then 25% once the walls and everything's constructed,

another 25% when the roof is put on,

and the final payment once the contract has been fulfilled.

But what the IFAs were getting paid by Harlequin

was the full 100% at the beginning.

So, the IFA that I was engaging with,

when he delved into my financial situation,

he realised that I had a huge pension pot.

It was over £300,000, as security.

Then obviously he put two and two together

and came up with Harlequin.

It's a gravy train.

There's a huge and growing network

of individuals benefiting from Harlequin.

From 2010, people started investing in Harlequin through their pensions,

which was obviously a huge concern, because to be investing in something

like an unregulated overseas investment scheme like Harlequin

was a huge risk back then.

IFAs were falling over themselves to sell the Harlequin product

because they were getting all the money in one hit.

I think in one case,

one of the salesmen earned £3 million from selling it.

So, as a result, the financial advisers

were bringing in anybody they could.

It wouldn't matter

if you were probably going to die in the next five years.

They were taking your money and putting you into the scheme.

Could it be a massive con,

or was the chairman completely out of his depth?

The Serious Fraud Office has connected the dots

on what seems like a fraudulent firm

who've been selling luxury Caribbean properties

they had no way of building.

The maths never worked in the Harlequin scheme

for the simple reason the only money coming into it was investor money.

It became apparent pretty early on that there was no outside finance,

and that was something that the chairman was quite proud of.

Saying, "This is just me and the investors.

"We don't owe anything to anybody else.

"It's you and me in this together."

But throughout the life of Harlequin,

we know that he was going out and trying to raise finance,

and he was very plausible and very compelling

when he was giving his speeches.

The Harlequin held regular investor meetings,

and in the early days,

it was all sort of pomp and glory and celebrities walking on stage.

Now, the investors thought

when they were handing over their cash,

it was going to be used to build their dream cabana.

What they didn't realise was it was being used to buy the land,

build the resort - so, the bars, the swimming pools.

It was being used to pay the staff,

it was being used to pay the chairman and his family,

and it was just being wasted

on vanity projects, architects, builders, engineers -

the whole nine yards.

So literally, by the end of it,

what was left of your individual investor's £30,000?

About seven quid.

The scale of the financial chaos is huge,

but they need to prove the chairman is deliberately defrauding people

and not just a bad businessman.

It makes it a lot easier

if you can see a person buying a Ferrari or a Rolex watch

or having invested in £2 million houses.

It's a much more jury-friendly way of selling a fraud.

And yet, there were no visible signs of extravagance

by the chairman and his family.

He was paying himself a very nice salary.

He was paying his two sons

and his wife a salary.

On the face of it, that wasn't a problem.

This was a multi-million-pound business,

and you would expect the chairman and the people running it

to basically be paid an appropriate wage.

For example, one of the sons was a former postman

before he joined Harlequin

and then was all of a sudden earning hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The chairman and his family made £6 million from the scheme

but, in addition, they lived a very nice millionaire lifestyle.

They travelled around the world first-class,

stayed in the best hotels,

and everything was charged to the business

over and above the six million they paid themselves.

One extraordinary vanity project never took off.

He bought planes.

Cos there was no major airport

in Saint Vincent

and he had to bring people there,

he was going out and buying these small jets

and flying them in from nearby islands

that had airports.

And he was proposing to start an airline

and build an airport at the resort,

and again, he was proposing to use investor money.

Once there is a break in a chain, a Ponzi scheme stops feeding itself.

A Ponzi scheme is where investors' money

is not used for the investment it says it's going to be used.

It's used to pay off other investors.

But then Harlequin couldn't pay the interest that it promised,

which was when things started to really fall apart.

They were robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay the IFAs,

but they still got away with the millions

that they appropriated.

The whole thing came crashing down because the money ran out.

People were aware there was a serious fraud investigation

at that point.

There were also investors from all around the world

who were taking legal action, saying,

"I was promised this and I haven't got it.

"I'd like my money back."

In 2013, Harlequin goes into administration.

And that's when you knew that it was game over.

At that time, it wasn't apparent there'd be any form of compensation.

It was a total loss.

We first spoke to the chairman as soon as we'd gone over.

We went in and introduced ourselves and said,

"We would like to come and interview you under caution,"

and he was very cooperative.

We then got their physical books and records.

The administrator gave us

about 150 boxes' worth of information.

Even though the business is red flagged in administration,

it doesn't automatically stop it continuing operations.

It is just the UK business that went into administration.

It still had a number of overseas companies

which were operational,

and the chairman swapped to a Cayman-registered company.

So, although one company went into administration,

another company had already been set up to take its place.

For the investigators,

it was a struggle to unpick the poor business decisions

from acquisitive fraud.

The more things we found out that were, frankly, sheer lunacy...

To give you an example, Saint Vincent is a volcanic island.

There is no golden beach there,

and so he shipped in some dredger full of sand

to create a beach for a vast amount of money,

and it got washed out at the first tide.

That was it.

A million quid, just gone.

Another decision sinks without a trace.

He wanted a pirate ship.

Pirates of the Caribbean was big at the time,

and he decided this would be a fantastic selling point,

to have a pirate ship in the bay

which could act as a restaurant, a dive platform, whatever.

Which, on the face of it, that sounds fantastic.

I'd go there.

They built this thing in Thailand with no insurance.

It sailed as far as Florida, I believe,

and then got caught up in a hurricane.

Again, vast amounts of money just wasted.

The ship's no longer there, the sand is no longer there,

and it does sort of upset you that it's investors who paid in,

and it's all gone.

It's December 2016.

Three years have passed,

and SFO investigators are waiting to make their move.

The accountant case looks about to settle.

We'd done our work

and, yes, we were convinced that there was a major problem.

We were ready to charge in 2016.

However, our counsel advised at the time

that we should wait before we charged anybody in this matter.

If this all turns out to be the accountants' fault,

we don't have a case against the chairman,

so it was a risk we were unwilling to take.

The judge said the chairman described himself as a visionary,

but in his view, he referred to him as a Walter Mitty-type character

who was incredibly dishonest and incompetent, led people on,

and had these grand visions that never came out in reality.

The judge's summing up of the chairman was so damning,

it gave us confidence to proceed with our case.

The judge was in agreement with the chairman.

He agreed that the builders had defrauded him.

He agreed that the accountants

had certainly been professionally negligent.

However, before he awarded vast amounts of money in damages,

he was quite clear,

and he said, "They cost you about 20 million,

"which is a drop in the ocean

"compared to how much money you've taken from the investors

"and basically wasted."

In the end, the judge awarded Harlequin 11 million,

but it wasn't given to Harlequin.

It was held in a separate account to be used to help investors

who'd lost out because of the scheme.

Brilliant.

We could not have hoped for a better result,

and it immediately cleared the way for us

to go ahead and charge him, which we did in early 2017.

At the beginning, we had no idea what was going through his mind.

It could have been just another investment scheme

that went wrong with no criminality.

However, what we managed to identify was that,

at a certain point in time,

he was told his scheme wasn't working,

and therefore we charged him from that date onwards,

saying, "At this point, you knew it wasn't going to work."

But for about three years he carried on trading,

he carried on taking money from investors,

even though he knew he was never going to be able to deliver.

The killer piece of evidence suggesting it was fraud

emerged after a series of meetings.

He ended up back in London trying to raise money in the city,

and he brought in some consultants to do that who were very clever,

very smart, took one look at this thing and said,

"You have a real problem. You are trading whilst insolvent."

And so they said, "Look, with the best will in the world,

"this scheme doesn't work. It's a train wreck.

"Everyone is going to lose their money.

"You've got to stop, and you've got to stop now."

And he didn't. He said, "You've got it wrong.

"You don't understand my vision.

"You don't understand the business model."

And he immediately sacked his finance director,

saying it was all his fault.

So, he went and got a second opinion,

and the second opinion was,

"Either give everyone their money back

"or go into liquidation,

"but just stop doing what you're doing."

And when he then came back to the office in Basildon,

he said, "It's fine. They got it wrong.

"We don't have a problem. Carry on selling."

He was in denial in many cases

about the state of what was going on,

but he still managed to take in millions of pounds from investors,

even when things were really bad.

That was huge.

That was the point where the investigation

could absolutely pin him down and say,

"On this specific date,

"you and your organisation were all told

"this thing was not working and you had to stop immediately."

And so fraud by abuse of position was the charge,

because basically, "At that point, you knew you couldn't deliver,

"but you carried on taking people's money."

Before that, he could claim ignorance.

But the chairman was having none of it,

and was happy to tell investigators just that.

With most cautioned interviews at this office,

most people do a pre-prepared statement

and do a "no comment" interview.

The chairman decided not to take that route,

and spoke throughout the whole interview.

He loves the sound of his own voice.

We could not shut him up.

His background was sales,

and what I felt was he thought he could talk his way out of this,

he could sell to us that it was a genuine business model.

The chairman was delusional. It was all just fantasy.

When things started to go wrong, he didn't stop.

He just kept taking money in.

Holiday property company Harlequin and its chairman

are now under official investigation...

..and the SFO can start number-crunching

and reaching out to investors who have become victims.

We had access to Harlequin's database.

It was just the scale of the whole thing

that set it apart.

You know, maybe 800, 1,000 investors is about standard.

8,000 people, so it was off the charts.

So, we knew where all the investors were at this point.

We could say, "Right, tell us, where was your investment?

"When was it made?

"Which resort did you think you were buying into?

"How were you approached? Was it by Harlequin directly?

"Was it by a financial advisor?"

And crucially, "Are you willing to give evidence in court?"

An awful lot of people who are caught up in this sort of scheme

are very reluctant to go to court.

In some cases, they're reluctant

because they haven't told their family that,

you know, the savings are all gone

and they've lost everything.

I don't think anybody could afford to lose any of the money.

It's a decision you should take really seriously,

and clearly, in hindsight, we didn't take it seriously enough.

You just get carried away with the hyperbole

and the images and the Caribbean.

In terms of the type of investor,

it tended to be the more mature person,

simply because they have access to disposable income.

And at a certain stage in life,

you need to start thinking about financing your retirement.

Maybe you want to get your kids on the property ladder.

And when it went wrong, the knock-on effect was

your kids are moving back into the home with you

and you can't retire for ten years.

My investments in Harlequin were around about 150,000.

There's a consequential loss, because I'm retired now,

more or less retired, and I'm not getting the pension

that I would've got if I hadn't had made that investment.

So, a consequential loss is

you're never, ever going to get back to where you would have been

without the investment in Harlequin.

It's impossible.

The Harlequin group ultimately took a total of £398 million

of people's money.

A lot of people suffered terribly down the line,

really badly, with losing their houses,

losing their marriages,

and I think some people committed suicide as well.

A lot of people were trying to speak out about this,

and there was a website called HarleCON,

which was up on the internet saying, "This is a horrible scam.

"Don't go near it with a bargepole."

I have very close family and they saw me very bitter,

very angry, and became mildly obsessed by the whole thing.

And lots of people did.

There was a chatroom and you'd kind of log on it every day,

and you'd sort of vent your anger

and you'd try and glean anything you could.

The chairman was not above threatening those people

who complained about the Harlequin scam.

So, whenever a complaint was put to the chairman of Harlequin,

he would often be very litigious.

He would get lawyers involved.

He would try and shut the complaint down,

be quite aggressive in his tactics.

There was one lady who was hit with basically threats

from a very well-known London law firm

and by the lawyers working for Harlequin in house,

threatening to bankrupt her, to take her home,

financially ruin her, unless she shut up.

And it was the same with journalists.

Any time a journalist wrote a story about him

or what Harlequin was doing, he would be very litigious.

He would get lawyers.

He'd be threatening and trying to bully people

into not writing about him or what was going on.

And what you have to remember is that 8,000 people invested money

they couldn't afford to lose, and lives were destroyed,

and that's one of the hardest things in this job.

The feelings when you've got an inkling

about what was happening to the money,

it was just anger, frustration, really,

because we couldn't get the money back.

It had all been appropriated.

So, it's your money that they're spending

and you're looking for answers.

And then at the end of the day,

you just realise that there was no hope.

There was no money left in Harlequin. It had all gone.

In the early days, the obsession was terrible.

It became so toxic and so unproductive

and so pointless in the end, I just stopped it.

There was one guy I remember

whose wife very sadly died of cancer,

and he approached Harlequin and said, "I need my money back.

"I need my money back because my wife is dying.

"I would like to do something nice with her before she dies."

"No."

"Could I have the money for the funeral?"

"No."

And then he himself died of cancer before the thing was concluded.

We read his statement out at the trial

because we felt we owed it to him.

Because of Covid,

it takes five years from charging in 2017

to get the chairman in court by spring 2022,

and it's a 12-week trial.

I have to admit, when the trial was about to start,

I was nervous, because I'd been working on it for ten years.

And once you get to trial, it's out of your hands.

You present your case and it's in the hands of the jury.

The chairman did not give evidence in court.

Once we had presented our case, his counsel played a video,

and it was a promotional video of Buccament Bay,

which is the only resort

they actually managed to build and run,

showing all the wonderful things that were at Buccament Bay

to the soundtrack of Under The Sea from The Little Mermaid.

And at the end of the video, the barrister said,

"Yeah, the defence rests,"

at which point the jury were looking at each other going,

"What the hell? Was that it?

"We've been here for, like, two and a half months

"and that's the defence?"

We had an expert witness who came in

and gave a very good breakdown of the scheme,

and crucially, he was able to bring in

some fantastic graphics,

which made it very simple

and very clear to the jury

that the cost of building

just one of these properties

had gone so far over budget.

To deliver what Harlequin was purporting to build

in these resorts around the world,

the judge actually said that they would need

an extra £1.2 billion to do this,

so there was a £1.2 billion shortfall in the funding.

The jury had endured the back and forth

of the fraud trial for the best part of three months.

They deliberate for a day and a half.

The verdict was guilty on all counts.

He was sentenced for just over 12 years.

It was a surprise for me that he got 12 years.

That was the outcome that most people would have wanted, I suppose,

cos he was the fall guy.

The length of the sentence is longer than we would normally expect,

but the judge said, you know,

"This is huge,

"and the damage you've done to so many individuals is incalculable,

"and that should be recognised in the sentence."

It was relief and exhaustion,

because the whole team had worked so hard.

I was so happy for my team, and also for the investors.

Some investors, even those who weren't giving evidence,

came to the trial and sat in the gallery.

They knew they weren't getting their money back.

Their lives had already been damaged irreparably

by what had happened,

but finally they got to have justice,

which meant a huge amount to them,

and that is what makes the job worthwhile.

I think, even to this day,

he believes that what he did was genuine

and it wasn't fraud, it was just he received poor advice.

He also claimed that thieves don't stay at the scene of the crime,

and pointed to the fact that 20 investors

had managed to secure cabanas, but this was ludicrous,

because out of the 8,000 people who had invested in Harlequin,

only 20 of them had actually really seen a return

on their investments.

The total loss to the investors in the Harlequin scheme

was approximately 400 million.

The Serious Fraud Office got involved

and they kept me informed all the way through,

right the way through to the court cases.

They were brilliant.

I think they did a great job. They really did.

They plugged away and they stuck at it.

It was funny, because my daughter mentioned something.

She said, "Dad, when you started this case, I was at primary school."

When my daughter put it that way,

it shows how long this case actually took.

She was 11,

and by the time it finished, she was 21, finishing university.

The chairman of Harlequin and his family,

they benefited from this to the tune of about £6.2 million.

I'd have liked to have seen

some of the others held more accountable

down the line, but they weren't.

Some of the sales guys

who were selling the property scheme,

they made millions of pounds themselves.

So, people made huge amounts of money,

but in the end, it was the investors who lost out.

It was the people who were borrowing off family, friends,

bank loans, second mortgages -

they're the ones who really came out of it badly.

And the tragedy is, nine times out of ten,

people don't get their money back. It's gone.

In this instance, he wasn't going to ride off into the sunset

and have plastic surgery and vanish.

No. It was just wasted.

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