Russell King (fraudster)
Russell Stephen King is a convicted fraudster. He is best known for his part in the doomed purchase of Notts County Football Club by Munto Finance, a subsidiary of Qadbak Investments, which was the subject of a BBC One Panorama programme. In July 2018, after several years living in Bahrain, he was extradited to Jersey, where he was charged in the Jersey Royal Court with 25 counts of fraud and larceny. In 2019, he was sentenced to six years imprisonment. He was released in 2021.
Background
King first surfaced in the 1980s as chairman of Celebrity Group Holdings, a publishing company based in Kingston upon Thames, which owned titles such as Basketball Monthly and which was interested in taking over Eddy Shah's newspaper The Post and Hamley's toy shop. It also owned Zodiac Toys, which became insolvent in 1990. Along with his business partner Alan Kingston, King was also a director of Kingston Basketball Club. However, in 1991 King was sentenced to two years in prison for insurance fraud after trying to claim £600,000 for his Aston Martin Zagato after claiming it had been stolen. It was discovered hidden in a garage. Whilst he was in prison, Celebrity Group went into liquidation and was sued for £684,000 by Creditcorp, which alleged fraudulent behaviour by Celebrity Group's directors.In the 1990s, King was associated with the publicist Max Clifford, and appeared in a controversial episode of Kilroy where Clifford had a fracas with the member of parliament Roger Gale. In 2004, he was involved with a sports agency called Essentially Sport, which represented Jenson Button.
Belgravia Financial Services Group
In the mid 2000s, King was involved with a Jersey-based company called Belgravia Financial Services Group. After the death of a business partner in 2008, King manipulated an employee of the business into transferring £671,000 from the business into his own personal account. He also sold the late partner's collection of cherished number plates and kept the proceeds. When Jersey-based company Close Finance sought repayment of £2m it had loaned to Belgravia, King fled to Bahrain.Swiss Commodity Holding, First London Bank, and Qadbak Investments
In 2009, King pursued a series of new financial cons, building on founded a company called Swiss Commodity Holding, which claimed assets of $2 trillion besides the rights to all the gold, iron ore and coal in North Korea. He then approached British investment bank First London plc, and by falsely claiming he was managing billions of dollars for the Bahraini royal family, he got the bank to turn over 49 per cent of its shares to him. The following year, First London went into administration with debts of £8.7m.Notts County F.C. acquisition and resale
In July 2009, King acted as head negotiator and consultant for the purchase of Notts County Football Club by Munto Finance, a subsidiary of Qadbak Investments, another company trading on nonexistent connections with wealthy Bahraini families.King negotiated the sale of the football club to Munto for £1. He personally recruited former England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson as director of football at Notts County, promising him a large sum if he also worked for SCH. While these negotiations were underway, King, representing SCH, visited North Korean Chairman Kim Yong-nam of the Supreme People's Assembly in Pyongyang. Eriksson and Peter Willett joined King on the trip. The purpose of the visit was nominally to persuade the government to hand over gold mining rights in exchange for billions of US dollars allegedly from Bahraini investors.
King used the pseudonym "L. Voldemort", after the Harry Potter character Lord Voldemort, and later claimed that he could not have been involved because the name Russell King did not appear in any documents. Notts County did not receive the promised funds and was unable to pay its bills. It was resold for a small sum that December five months after the purchase, with debts of £7 million.