LARNACA club owner Antonis Fanieros, 57, was yesterday sentenced to five years imprisonment for his part in a scam to cash £143,000 worth of someone else’s shares.
His accomplices, Vryssoules businessman Christos Hartoumbalos, 32, and lorry driver Petros Georgiou, 31, also from Vryssoules, were sentenced to five and three years in jail respectively.
In passing sentence, the three-judge Assizes court, convening in Larnaca, was heavily critical of the gullibility of the banks, brokerages and government officers taken in by the fraudsters.
The victim of the scam was Dherynia businessman Georgios Alexandrou. In March last year, the swindlers managed, using forged documents and Hartoumbalos’ impersonation of Alexandrou, to dupe a Nicosia and a Larnaca brokerage into selling thousands of the Dherynia businessman’s high-flying Bank of Cyprus and Louis Cruise Lines shares. The scammers got two banks to issue them with deeds for Alexandrou’s shares and to cash cheques in the victim’s name issued by the brokerages. All this was achieved, the court heard, with the unwitting help of government officials who certified signatures on fake documents for Fanieros, Hartoumbalos and Georgiou.
Court president Georgios Aresti noted that the scam had been “amateurish” and that the three swindlers left a trail of clues in their wake. Aresti laid into those taken in by the scam, speaking of “slipshod and shoddy” handling by the banks and brokerages and “criminal and irresponsible” actions by the certifying government officers.
The three men faced a total of 14 charges of conspiring to deceive, forgery and impersonation. Fanieros was found guilty of conspiring and impersonation, but not of forgery. Hartoumbalos had pleaded guilty to all 14 charges while Georgiou was found guilty of only three of the 14 charges and therefore received a lighter sentence.
In passing sentence, the court took into consideration the fact that Alexandrou had been fully reimbursed by the three defendants.
The trial and sentencing was carried out under heavy police security because of Fanieros’ alleged underworld links. The club owner, who famously survived a drive-by machine gun attack in May 1997, attracted a large crowd of cheering friends and relatives to the court.
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