Ex-model’s champagne life as firm went bust
A COMPANY director accused of fleecing hundreds of Britons out of their pensions had ‘the sort of life most of us would give our right arm for’.
Jody Smart, also known as Jody Bell, flaunted her luxury lifestyle while customers of her Spanish-based firm Continental Wealth Management say they lost most of their retirement savings.
Many were persuaded to invest because CWM was listed on the HMRC website.
In September 2016 the former model appeared on the Channel 5 show How the Other Half live – just a few months before her company went bust.
Footage showed her at the Costa Blanca headquarters of CWM, which the programme said was worth £13million. She was also filmed enjoying a champagne picnic, driving a Mercedes and showing off her floor-to-ceiling shoe collection.
Presenter Eamonn Holmes told viewers: ‘The corporate world has given Jody the sort of life that most of us would give our right arm for. A stunning house in Spain, fast cars and a vast shoe collection.’ She was on the show to promote her fashion company, Jody Bell Sl, which was funded almost entirely with money from CWM. The cash helped pay for her to travel to New york Fashion Week to present her outfits. A mother of two,
‘Floor-to-ceiling shoe collection’
she grew up in Herefordshire before moving to Spain where she started a relationship with CWM founder Darren Kirby.
Despite having no financial qualifications or experience, she became the sole director of the company. She was paid a salary of £122,000 a year, a Spanish court heard last month.
Three British claimants are pursuing combined £2.5million claims against Miss Smart, Mr Kirby and two others of aggravated fraud, fake accounting and belonging to a criminal organisation. The court has heard that when CWM went bust it had just £56,000 in the bank.
yet from 2015 to 2017, hundreds of thousands of pounds was paid to her fashion label and to a property holding company registered in her name.
Miss Smart denied ever dealing with clients or having anything to do with the running of CWM other than promoting it in the Spanish media.
She said she visited the office in Denia occasionally because it had a room where she kept her designer clothes.
She and Mr Kirby, who did not respond to a court summons for cross-examination, did not answer requests for comment.