We paid £1m in legal aid for wealthy ‘Lord of Fraud’
A CONMAN dubbed the “Lord of Fraud” who once planned the world’s biggest bank raid got £1million in legal aid despite leaving hundreds of pensioners out of pocket.
Bogus aristocrat Hugh Rodley, 71, from Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, has been convicted of two multimillion-pound frauds.
He fleeced elderly victims out of millions of pounds using a boiler room-style investment scam which involved selling worthless shares to a “sucker list” of targets.
Now figures released via a Freedom of Information request show he benefited from £830,311.02 in solicitors’ and barristers’ fees over a 15-year period between 2001 and 2016.
The taxpayer-funded payouts came although the career criminal has failed to pay back a penny to his victims. Instead the father of three splashed the proceeds of his crimes on a Gloucestershire mansion and luxury cars.
In 2009 he was jailed for eight years for trying to steal £229million from the London offices of the Japanese-run Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, along with three other men, in one of the biggest cyber crimes of its kind.
The plan to plunder the Japanese bank in 2004 failed at the last minute after the bungling gang inputed the wrong computer codes.
And in 2012 he was handed an additional seven-year sentence after being convicted of conning 741 pensioners out of £6million.
One 87-year-old man lost more than £800,000. The fraudster was ordered to repay £1,236,736 to the victims of his investment con in November 2014. But after failing to repay anything, the former insurance broker and one-time nightclub owner was jailed in 2016 for a further seven years.
Earlier this year it was reported Rodley had struck a deal with prosecutors to sell his mansion, Tudor Manor in Tewkesbury, so he could get out of jail. But his wife of 39 years, “Lady” Pamela, 65, blocked the move, saying the property title was in her name. During a hearing at Southwark Crown Court in December, Judge Andrew Goymer ruled that Rodley still had an interest in the mansion.
He ordered the property be sold and an enforcement receiver appointed to help with the sale.the property should fetch £950,000.
The retired model said she would prefer her estranged husband stay in jail for a further five years rather than her lose her home.
Last night critics questioned the decision to continue funding Rodley’s legal battle. Harry Fletcher of the Victims’ Rights Campaign said: “It is totally unacceptable that a convicted multiple fraudster has received vast sums of legal aid when seemingly he has paid nothing back.”
A Legal Aid Agency spokesman said: “Defendants must pass a strict means test before being granted legal aid and may have to pay it back if found guilty and they can afford to.”