Financial adviser who swindled elderly loses appeal

A FINANCIAL adviser jailed for defrauding two elderly women has claimed he was under pressure to plead guilty to one of his crimes.

Carl O’Connell, a former Lloyds bank employee, also claimed he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder at the time of the conviction.

O’Connell, of Bradley Stoke, previously admitted to defrauding a 95-year-old woman out of £15,000. He was also found guilty of taking £260,105 from 88-yearold dementia sufferer, Helen Smith. In 2015 he was sentenced to four and a half years in jail for four counts of fraud.

The 49-year-old was acquitted of three further counts of fraud at the same trial and faced a retrial on another. O’Connell paid a £15,000 cheque from the pensioner into his personal mortgage account, the court heard. He claimed it was a personal gift she had made to him. Now O’Connell has claimed that his conviction on the final fraud count was ‘unsafe’ and should be overturned. He had been ‘pres- surised to plead guilty’, he claimed, and was unfit to plea due to post traumatic stress.

But Mrs Justice Andrews said: “There is no substance whatsoever in the suggestion he was pressurised to plead guilty. We are not persuaded that there was anything to alert his counsel to the fact he was not fit to plead.”

The judge said O’Connell’s challenge had ‘no merit whatsoever’. Had he not already been released from jail, she would have ordered him to serve extra time for wasting court resources.