Tim Hannam KC and Rupert Jones secure the convictions of three defendants charged with cheating the public revenue and defrauding pensioners of their investments, following an eight month trial at Leeds Crown Court.

The case was difficult and challenging, involving millions of pounds and an enormous amount of complex documentation designed to obscure the truth behind a deliberately confusing façade: a truth which concerned the hijacking of an obsolete but FCA-registered Friendly Society, which had a defunct pension fund.

The defendants dusted down the Friendly Society, renamed it, and used it to offer an investment scheme which dishonestly claimed to allow the early payment out of a proportion of a pension whilst safely investing the remainder for the future.  In truth, tax at 55% was payable on the early receipts, and the remainder was simply stolen by the defendants, who diverted it for their own benefit.

The diversion of the funds was concealed behind a detailed set of lies which purported to show that the bogus pension fund under the control of the defendants had bought the debt of Doncaster Rovers Football Club as part of a series of transactions through which, with the innocent assistance of both Louis Tomlinson (ex-boy band member of One Direction) and also the ex-Club Chairman John Ryan, they had earlier attempted to buy the team.

Two more defendants will be tried in 2026 and confiscation proceedings are in train.  In order to successfully prosecute the case, Tim and Rupert had to marshal a simply enormous amount of detail and present it in a way which the jury were able to digest and understand, and which given the verdicts they obviously did.

The defendants had set out to design an un-prosecutable scheme of bewildering complexity, but failed.  They will be sentenced in the New Year.