A Kenyan businessman who ran a share-selling scam from offices in London and Barcelona has been forced to hand back a quarter of the £4m that his company managed to dupe out of British investors.
The Financial Services Authority (FSA) said yesterday it had obtained a court order to force Aniz Manji to hand over £1m, which will be distributed to the 500 or so UK investors who were persuaded to buy worthless shares between March and November 2006 in a Spanish-based scheme known as a "boiler room" scam.
Manji, who owned the London-based firm Bayshore Nominees, used two companies in Barcelona - Gatemore Securities and Enterprise Analytics - to cold-call UK investors to sell them worthless shares. The FSA said the unregulated operation targeted investors whose names appeared on a list of individuals who had fallen for similar scams in the past.
The London offices of Bayshore were designed to give the operation "some credibility" to investors.
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