A missing Porsche driven off from a London car park by a mystery motorist, £367,000 spent on wine, and £500,000 paid to a dating agency are to be targeted by prosecutors in a bid to make a fraudster pay his debts.
Gerald Smith, who owes £73 million in an unpaid confiscation order, also used his criminal gains to spend nearly £1.5 million on other cars including a Bentley Continental, an Aston Martin, four Mercedes and four BMWs.
Smith, a 65-year-old former GP, also paid £359,000 for chandeliers by US artist Dale Chihuly. The spending is revealed in a schedule of Smith’s potential assets drawn up by the Serious Fraud Office for a commercial court hearing.
The fraudster has won permission from the court to have his confiscation order debt reduced after prosecutors accepted that he will fall at least £30 million short of the target.
A future crown court hearing will decide how much of the remainder he will be required to pay. But the SFO has set out where it aims to recoup money in a 35-page document that lists all the transactions it believes might have been carried out using Smith’s illicit gains.
They include about £500,000 paid to Barbara Brudenell-Bruce’s dating agency Rendezvous London. Other payments that prosecutors say were made to “friends, relatives, associates” using Smith’s money include £300,000 given to Geoffrey Trew, a consultant on reproductive medicine at London’s Imperial Healthcare Trust.
Separate court documents describe him as a founding director of The Fertility Partnership, the largest provider of IVF in northern Europe, and show that he paid £1.2 million to a litigation fund set up to fight Smith’s legal battles.
The documents reveal that Mr Trew was interviewed by the SFO in 2019 and provided “10 years of bank statements to prove the sources of his wealth.”
At least 20 car purchases are documented. The SFO warns that “the whereabouts of the Porsche 911 Targa 4S which was abandoned in a London car park last year (and subsequently collected by a person unknown)” will also have to be explained by Smith.
Smith was convicted in 1993 over the theft of £2 million from a pension fund, and in 2006 for taking £34 million from an IT firm. He was jailed for 11 years.
