A conman who donated £2.4 million of stolen funds to the Liberal Democrats has admitted money laundering at a court in Majorca.
Glaswegian Michael Brown, 57, was handed a three-month prison sentence on Friday after striking a plea bargain deal with Spanish state prosecutors. State prosecutors have agreed to the sentence being suspended but convicted fraudster Brown will have to pay a €1.5million (£1.29m) fine as part of conditions attached to the deal.
Criminal charges were dropped against his wife Sharon, who had been accused of helping her playboy businessman partner to launder millions of pounds of dirty money in Spain through two firms and using it to buy property, cars and boats. The plea bargain deal, which involved Brown putting his hands up to wrongdoing, was cemented during what was scheduled to be a pre-court hearing at a court in the Majorcan capital Palma on Friday morning to discuss legal issues ahead of the trial proper.
The ex-Lib Dem donor was not present in court and followed the proceedings via video-link. Prosecutors had been demanding a five year prison sentence and a €6million (£5.15m) fine for Brown if convicted of money laundering ahead of the hearing.
The punishment they were seeking first emerged in 2018. The judge-led probe in Majorca was launched at the behest of anti-corruption investigators around the time Brown was completing a jail term for theft and fraud offences in the UK.
A 13-page pre-trial Spanish prosecution indictment alleged Brown spent some of his ill-gotten gains on two stunning properties in Majorca, including a sprawling Love Island-style house in the resort of Andratx which prosecutors alleged was bought with laundered money. It is near a property he and his wife bought in the island mountain town of Esporles.
The indictment claimed Brown used a complex company set-up based around two Spanish firms for the acquisitions, which also included a £60,000 Porsche Cayenne and a £70,000 Jaguar.
It also highlighted a “continued and unjustified number of bank transfers controlled by Brown which made no sense and were designed simply to hide the true origin and destination of those funds.”
Prosecutors claimed in their lengthy pre-trial indictment, alleging the Scot had committed wrongdoing between the years 2004 and 2006 in Spain: “The accused has engaged in handling and hiding funds originating from criminal activities, especially concealment of assets committed in the UK, with full knowledge of the illegal origin of the funds.”
Brown accepted he was the “material author” of a money laundering offence as part of the deal secured through his acclaimed Majorcan-based defence lawyer Jaime Campaner. As well as accepting the suspended prison sentence and the heavy fine, he has agreed to the surrender of assets obtained through his criminal activity including the Porsche Cayenne, Jaguar and a £264,000
Fairline Targa 43 motor boat.
It was not immediately clear why prosecutors had withdrawn their allegations against his wife, who they claimed “knew the criminal origin of the money she used and enjoyed” in their pre-trial indictment. She had been facing a prison demand of nearly three and a half years.
Brown handed the Lib Dems a record donation to fund their 2005 general election campaign. It later emerged he had accrued his enormous wealth by conning huge sums out of trusting investors including former Manchester United chairman Martin Edwards. He was nicknamed the ‘Lib Dem Ronnie Biggs’ after jumping bail in London to escape charges involving £36million in swindled funds.
He was on the run for more than three years before being held in the Dominican Republic in January 2012 and extradited to the UK via Spain to serve seven-and-a-half years in prison. He was released in January 2016 halfway through his sentence.
Around the same time news emerged that Spanish prosecutors wanted him jailed over money laundering offences, it was revealed he had landed a highly-sensitive job working for private security firm G4S. Brown, a former catering student who failed his maths O Grade and falsely claimed to have been the son of a lord and to have attended Gordonstoun and St Andrews University, has been out of the headlines now for several years.
Campaner had been seeking to stop Brown’s trial going ahead before Friday's plea bargain deal and ‘in voce’ sentence. The lawyer sought to have the case against his client dismissed on the basis he had already been tried in the UK for the same offences, raising the so-called ‘double jeopardy’ argument at a hearing in Palma in November 2019.
It is thought the issue remained unresolved ahead of Friday's hearing. The near-two decades that have passed since the crimes were committed is also understood to have played a part in the beneficial treatment Brown has received.
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