Seven year jail term for Midlothian man behind £18m investment fraud
Stephen Farley is starting a lengthy jail sentence this evening.
An ex-company director from Midlothian who carried out an elaborate'' £18 million investment fraud has been jailed for seven years.
Stephen Farley, 57, pretended he was an experienced financial dealer and encouraged people to invest money with his firm - sums they believed were being ploughed into the foreign exchange market.
He lured them in, sometimes by cold-calling, with promises of guaranteed minimum returns and limited potential losses.
But the truth was he was not an experienced trader, could not make any such guarantees, and most of the cash never saw its way to that market.
He was in fact using some of the money paid in by investors to issue returns to other people.
The money Farley obtained also helped fund his lavish lifestyle, sometimes shared with clients, involving expensive cars and hotel stays, dinners at exclusive restaurants and helicopter trips.
Farley, of Newtongrange, previously admitted obtaining £18,443,575 by fraud and appeared at the High Court in Edinburgh on Wednesday to be sentenced.
Judge Lady Scott told him: This was a complex and detailed fraudulent scheme which involved elaborate deception. Very significant sums of money were involved.''
The court heard Farley, who was based at offices in the centre of Edinburgh, ran his scheme between April 2004 and October 2008.