Former City stockbroker is sent down for defrauding investors
A FORMER City broker was locked up for 13 years yesterday after defrauding investors out of millions of pounds to finance his “lavish” lifestyle.
Nicholas Levene, 48, lost an estimated £32m of investors’ money between 2005 and 2009 after diverting funds given to him by investors into his own accounts.
Levene used £18m of the cash obtained to buy property in the UK and Israel and spend on overseas travel and holidays before he was caught in 2009.
Levene pleaded guilty to 12 counts of fraud, one of false accounting, and one of obtaining a money transfer by deception ahead of the start of a trial in September. Yesterday he was sentenced at Southwark Crown Court to 13 years.
Judge Martin Beddoe, sentencing, said: “It was a fraud from the outset, where countless lies were told. It was rank dishonesty. There were separate acts of individual moments of betrayal.”
The Serious Fraud Office, which brought the case, said Levene had used the money to finance a “lavish personal lifestyle”.