Mother of 5 ran £7.5m Ponzi scheme from home with moat
To her wealthy clients and friends, she was a successful and charming businesswoman.
Kankamol Albon’s skill at convincing people to buy luxury cars allowed her to live in a £4million, 14th-century mansion with ten bedrooms and a moat, take expensive holidays and send her five children to private schools.
But her lavish lifestyle turned out to be built on a pyramid scheme in which she defrauded investors of £7.5million. She has now been jailed for six years.
Albon, 41, known to her friends as ‘Minky’, talked her victims into handing over huge sums of money to buy prestige cars including Ferraris and Bentleys, but many customers never received them.
In one deal, she sold the same vehicle to two different people, Ipswich Crown Court heard on Wednesday.
The complicated Ponzi scheme saw Albon use money from new customers to pay off her most disgruntled creditors. Some people took out loans of hundreds of thousands of pounds on the promise of huge returns. A few lost their homes, cars and businesses.
Even while on bail after her arrest, she tried to fleece HM Revenue and Customs of £1.8million by pretending to sell cars abroad and claiming back VAT on the deals.
Albon was sentenced after admitting charges of false representation and cheating the public revenue in what Judge Rupert overbury called a ‘massive’, ‘greed-driven’ fraud.
He told Albon: ‘You persistently defrauded investors who were told that you were able to buy and sell high-value motor vehicles, such as Bugattis, Ferraris, Rolls-Royces and Maseratis, which you claimed could be immediately sold for profit and would be available for the personal use of investors. The majority of investors never saw a car.
‘They were persuaded to roll over so-called profits you were making so you could maintain the illusion you were running a profitable business.’
Albon, who was raised in Thailand and came to Britain 28 years ago, started working as a bookkeeper in 1993 at NA Carriage Company, which was in the name of her now estranged husband Nigel, 55, a former racing driver.
She took over the company in 2004 and the court heard that it made vast sums. At one point, she withdrew £580,000 and spent it on her home, Smallbridge Hall, in Bures, near Sudbury, Suffolk, where she ran the business and lived with her three daughters and two sons.
In August 2008, the company failed and police became involved six months later, when a victim launched a civil case to recover money. After her arrest, she claimed that she had been blackmailed into selling hundreds of luxury cars for less than their market value.
However, Julian Christopher, prosecuting, said that Albon had run a Ponzi scheme. ‘As her losses grew, so did the need for further investors and customers,’ he said.
Kevin Baumber, defending, said the business had been run legitimately for years but got into trouble after losing millions in a foreign business venture. Albon’s VAT fraud involved sales to overseas investors, but 107 of the 122 deals she reported did not exist.
Smallbridge Hall was repossessed and is now on sale for £3.9million.
Detective Constable Adrian Finbow, of Suffolk Police, said the inquiry was complicated by Albon’s ‘pointing the finger at others’.
He said: ‘We are satisfied she acted alone and her sole motivation was one of excessive greed and the desire to buy luxury goods and live an opulent lifestyle.’