The Lord of Fraud

It is 1pm on Saturday, October 2, 2004, and the City of London is deathly quiet. Two men – one carrying a laptop, the other sporting a ponytail – arrive at the locked doors of the European headquarters of Japan’s Sumitomo Matsui Banking Corporation. Their inside man lets them in, having already adjusted the motion sensors on the CCTV cameras so they won’t be witnessed.

Thanks to the same insider, during September “Laptop” and “Ponytail” had installed key-logging software on Sumitomo’s PCs. This recorded the passwords and account details of bank customers: the information they are now coming to harvest.

They go to the website of SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, used by 8000 organisations to transfer cash around the world. With the stolen passwords they access the accounts of Toshiba International, Nomura Asset Management and other major companies – and systematically raid them. Funds are allocated to other banks where accounts have been opened in the names of bogus companies, purporting to trade in products of all kinds, from computers to vegetable oils.

First, £13 million (equivalent to $35 million at the time) is earmarked for an account in Liechtenstein, then £19 million for banks in Spain; £57 million is set to transfer to accounts in Dubai, including £10 million to clothing firm Laxmi Devi Trading – named after the Hindu goddess of wealth. Further transactions are put in place for Hong Kong, Turkey, Israel and Singapore.

Having set up instructions to trans-fer £229 million ($618 million) out of Sumitomo, the men check the transaction form and press Send. Then they leave, congratulating themselves on having committed the biggest bank robbery in British history.

THE LORD

In his trademark bowler hat and bow tie, Lord Hugh Rodley, 57, steps out of his white Rolls-Royce in front of Tudor Manor, his £2 million home in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, to be greeted by his wife, Lady Pamela. The manor, where he gives lavish parties, is set in two hectares of grounds complete with paddocks and stables, where he keeps the prize-winning Morgan horses that his daughter Natasha has ridden at equestrian events up and down the country.

But the big man with a walrus moustache is not necessarily as respectable as he seems. A couple in their 60s from Northern Ireland invested £40,000 in one of his companies selling international phone-card franchises. When it went bust, the couple hired private detectives, who discovered Rodley had set up at least 30 companies that had mysteriously gone under. The husband wrote to him, pleading for their life savings. Rodley’s letter of reply was blunt: “I intend to expose you as a storyteller and a fraudster.”