A solicitor jailed for fraud has been ordered to pay back more than £1m in criminal assets – or face further time in prison.
Timothy Schools was sentenced to 14 years in 2022 for his role in a fraudulent scheme in which investors lost an estimated £100m.
The Serious Fraud Office brought further action through a proceeds of crime investigation. It secured a confiscation order against Schools after showing that he had hidden some of the proceeds of the fraud with members of his family, disguised as loans.
Southwark Crown Court ordered that if Schools fails to repay the confiscated money, he will face an additional five years in prison.
Paul Napper, head of proceeds of crime at the SFO, said: ‘Fraudsters use any means possible to disguise the money they steal, including hiding their assets among their friends and family in the hope that they will be safe. We will identify and pursue offenders’ assets using all the powers available to us, irrespective of who holds them. Our investigation into the criminal proceeds accrued by Schools continues.’
Schools was convicted of fraud alongside his business partner David Kennedy, after promising investors a secure return by offering loans to UK law firms that were pursuing no-win-no-fee cases. Few investors received a return and hundreds of people were left out of pocket.
The Cayman Islands-registered Axiom Legal Financing Fund, purportedly set up to lend money to firms, collapsed in 2012, affecting an estimated 35,000 clients whose cases depended on this finance.
Sentencing Schools, Judge Martin Beddoe said that the Axiom scheme was fraudulent ‘more or less from the start’, telling the solicitor that he was an ‘utterly dishonest man and that characteristic … has regrettably run through you for a very long time’.
Schools was struck off the roll in 2014 and is disqualified from being a company director for 15 years.
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