Continental Wealth Management director Jody Smart has lost her appeal against a conviction and four-year jail sentence for fraud.
The Supreme Court in Madrid has dismissed Jody Smart’s appeal against her fraud conviction – so Jody has once again been ordered to pay the costs and compensate her victims. Jody’s only option now is to appeal the conviction to the Constitutional Court. While it was already difficult for her to achieve anything at the Supreme Court, it is even more difficult at the Constitutional Court – which may not even consider the case. Jody might submit her appeal application to the Constitutional Court and it may not even be accepted for consideration.
The original judgement against Jody was made very clear during the original trial. The judge found she was responsible for deliberately swindling £370,000 out of two victims – Tim and Sally.
There is now a 30-day deadline for Jody to lodge an appeal with the Constitutional Court. But Spain has a legal system that is very protective of individual consumers’ rights, and it always seeks to ensure that fraud victims receive judicial protection. So it is unlikely that the Constitutional Court will even look at her appeal.
Having already already lost the battle before the Supreme Court, it now remains to be seen whether Jody will finally accept the reality – which means paying her victims (Tim and Sally) and going to prison for four years. Perhaps Jody will have one last shot at trying to drag out the judicial process – probably in the hope that her victims will die before she has to pay them.
The irony of this situation is that Jody, as sole director of Continental Wealth Management, was also legally responsible for 1,000 victims losing part or all of their £100 million worth of pensions and life savings. This case was brought to court in 2019, but failed to secure a criminal conviction against Jody or her various accomplices – including her partner Darren Kirby and “advisers” Neil Hathaway, Dean Stogsdill, Anthony Downs and Stephen Ward.
It is not hard to see why the court in the original fraud trial failed to convict Jody and her associates at CWM. The judge simply did not understand what had happened to the victims’ money.
In fact, what Jody and CWM did to 1,000 victims was only what routinely happens every day in much of the offshore financial services world:
- Valuable, safe pensions are transferred offshore spuriously
- Jurisdictions such as Malta, Gibraltar and Guernsey – with weak or corrupt regulation – are chosen so that investment fraud can be operated without constraint
- Pensions and life savings are put into insurance bonds with rogue insurers such as RL360, Utmost International and Friends Provident – resulting in huge undisclosed commissions to the fraudsters (which is clear fraud)
- The money trapped in the expensive, inflexible and unnecessary insurance bonds is then invested in high-risk, unsuitable investments which pay further undisclosed commissions to the fraudsters
It is believed the judge in the original fraud trial failed to understand where the fraud was – or why British expats would choose to transfer their pensions to rogue jurisdictions, such as Malta (which are known tax havens – routinely outlawed by Spain). The court just couldn’t understand what an insurance bond is (in fact, few consumers ever understand that either) or why the victims would have used an unregulated advisory firm or unqualified advisers.
There’s an interesting analagy here, though: Al Capone was finally jailed in 1931 for tax evasion – as opposed to being the boss of the violent and murderous Chicago Outfit during the Prohibition era. Similarly, Jody wasn’t convicted or jailed for fraud in the financial ruin of her 1,000 CWM victims – but she will probably (hopefully) be jailed for swindling Tim and Sally.
