‘Wicked’ fugitive jailed over £35m land scam
JUSTICE has finally caught up with a fraudster who went on the run more than five years ago after heading a land investment scam that cost investors more than £35 million.
James Maynard, 38, formerly of Croydon in South London, ran Countrywide Land Holdings and Regional Land, two businesses that sold vastly overpriced plots of land with the false claim that they would gain planning permission for housing and would rocket in value.
Mail on Sunday readers will have sidestepped Maynard’s scam. I warned in 2010 that it was a ripoff, as land he was selling in Kent was in a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, where investors would be unlikely to get permission for a fence, let alone a housing estate. In 2012, the then watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, took court action against Maynard and he was ordered to compensate victims.
The fraudster failed to pay a penny, and fled to Northern Cyprus, where he was safe from extradition.
Four crooks who worked alongside Maynard were convicted and jailed in 2013, with his friend Daniel Webster sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison. Maynard himself was arrested at Gatwick Airport in August. After pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud, he appeared at Blackfriars Crown Court in London last Monday and was sentenced to sevenand-a-half years in jail.
The case was led by Trading Standards officials from Tower Hamlets in East London, working with an investigation team from National Trading Standards and the Metropolitan Police. Mayor of Tower Hamlets John Biggs said: ‘This was one of the largest fraud cases brought before the courts by any local authority following a long investigation’.
Judge Martin Beddoe – who was also the judge at the 2013 trial – described Maynard as the ‘wicked heart’ of the scam which had left many victims ‘ruined or close to ruin’. He found that Maynard personally made £4.9 million from the fraud, with none of the money left. He disqualified him from running any British company for 15 years, the longest ban the law allows.