Three men jailed for £70m Bournemouth forestry pension fraud affecting 3,000 investors

Matthew Pickard, Stephen Greenaway and Paul Laver defrauded nearly 3,000 investors through a fake Costa Rica tree-planting scheme. Southwark Crown Court sentenced the trio to between four and six years.

Bournemouth directors jailed over £70m tree-planting pension scam

Three directors of a Bournemouth-based forestry investment company have been jailed after defrauding nearly 3,000 investors of their savings and pensions through a fake tree-planting scheme in Costa Rica, BBC News reports.

Matthew Pickard, 55, described by the court as the "driving force" behind the fraud, was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to fraudulent trading at Southwark Crown Court. Stephen Greenaway, 48, a former martial arts teacher from Poole, received five years and three months, while Paul Laver, 48, who previously shared a flat with Greenaway and was recently living in Ferndown, was handed four and a half years. All three had admitted the charge.

Ethical Forestry Ltd, which the men ran from an office block in Bournemouth, promised investors returns from forestry plantations in Costa Rica. The firm collected £70m from small investors before collapsing in 2015. The directors themselves extracted £14m from the business.

Judge Alexander Milne KC told the court it was "hard to overstate the impact of the company's collapse", adding: "Directors of companies are entitled to receive remuneration, shareholders' dividends. This was neither. This was plunder."

Between them, the three men purchased 45 luxury vehicles — including Ferraris, Porsches, and Pickard's Maserati Nero Granturismo — as well as homes and yachts. Former employee Susan Cox told prosecutors that staff became accustomed to the sound of the directors' "top-of-the-range, flash cars roaring into the parking area." The cars were hidden from sight when clients visited the premises.

Investors were lured in with an offer of a "free pension review" by sales staff working from Ethical Forestry's Bournemouth call centre, prosecutors said. A second employee in the same building would then recommend transferring funds into the forestry scheme. Within hours, paperwork was couriered to investors' homes for signing, enabling the business to drain their accounts.

Although some trees were planted in Costa Rica, prosecutors said the defendants failed to maintain the plantation or provide infrastructure for harvesting.

Andrea Panayi, from Middlewich in Cheshire, was among those who lost her retirement savings — £125,000 built up over 20 years working as a bank employee. "How can you treat human beings like that?" she said. "You look at them and they're quite pathetic. They don't have things written on their foreheads to tell you that they're pure evil, but then they really are. All of them."

Greenaway and Laver were each portrayed by their defence teams as having played a supporting rather than central role in the operation. The judge confirmed that all three men would be eligible for release after serving one third of their sentences.

Source: BBC News