Dubai-based British and Irish national Richard Fagan has been fined £62m by Gibraltar’s Supreme Court for his role in defrauding investors through the Kijani Commodity and Ratio funds.
Fagan, captain of the Irish national polo team, was one of four accused of fraudulent trading and financial mismanagement of the two Gibraltar registered companies. The two funds raised $123m from pension funds and private investors before regulators seized the funds in 2015 after an exposé by investigative intelligence platform OffshoreAlert in 2015.
Fagan was alleged to have siphoned off £56.2m from Kijani Resources and £5.8m from Ratio into companies he and his associates controlled. Furthermore, the funds’ assets were found to be hugely overvalued; the liquidators were only able to recover £1m from the £136m in investments that had been reported.
The judge ordered Fagan to pay £56.2m to Kijani Resources and £5.8m to Ratio with an additional 8% annual interest in February.
Of the other associates, Lisa Billington was absolved after agreeing to give evidence at the hearing, and judgment in default was entered against Simon Hooper and William Redford after they failed to comply with court orders. Reford was sentenced to 16 months’ imprisonment in 2018 for breaching the terms of a freezing injunction but has not turned himself in. Hooper was recently convicted of three counts of fraud in an unrelated case in the UK and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.
