Virendra Rastogi was jailed for nine and a half years

Virendra Rastogi, 40, had swanky offices in Piccadilly and made the Sunday Times' rich list with a sham £150million fortune. He bought disused mines and foundries as front for RBG metals and spent six years tricking banks into investing billions.The scam was eventually uncovered when one employee faxed documents to accountants Price Waterhouse Coopers by mistake.Rastogi was yesterday jailed for nine and a half years, his accomplices Anand Jain, 43, got eight and a half years and Guantam Majumdar, 56, seven and a half.
Judge James Wadsworth QC told them at the end of the eight-month trial: "The loss to the banking system was enormous. This was not a fraud done in a moment of madness but by years of calculation." Rastogi hid behind a "veneer of respectability" with a proper trading room and MP Jack Cunningham and three Lords as unsuspecting advisors.
His brother ran a mirror firm in the US creating 324 bogus client firms - using headed notepaper and company stamps - through which they siphoned off the cash.
One was a US launderette, another the home of an old woman who sold scrapbooks.Fraud Office staff who checked the phone number of one investor found it was answered by a child of 10, Southwark crown court in South London heard.The money was laundered through India, Dubai and Switzerland and never found.When police raided Rastogi's Mayfair apartment, he was frantically shredding documents.Rastogi, Jain, of North Finchley, North London, and Majumdar, of Chenai, India, claimed they were innocent of the massive scam going on around them.Paige Rumble, SFO investigator, said: "This was a truly audacious and ruthlessly efficient fraud ranging from the poorest areas of India to the corporate tower blocks of Manhattan."