Banker loses movies case

By Kaye Wiggins

A former Royal Bank of Scotland Group trader lost his multi-million-pound lawsuit over a fraudulent investment scheme that landed him in court and cost him a high-paid banking job.

Vincent Walsh, a former managing director at RBS, sued Greystone Financial Services over his backing of several films over three years, saying Greystone advised him to invest and submitted false documentation to tax authorities in his name.

Mr Walsh was indicted because of the investment and lost his job, though he was later cleared of the charges.

Mr Walsh sought at least £5.7m, which includes his investments of about £1.1m and lost earnings he would have made if he had been able to keep working as a senior banker until retirement.

He said it cost him £812,000 to defend himself in the criminal case, according to the judgment.

“None of Mr Walsh’s claims succeed,” Judge Christopher Nugee said in his ruling, where he found Mr Walsh was willing to go along with false information being submitted to the UK tax authority.

“I am well aware that the consequences for him will be disastrous.”

It’s unsurprising Mr Walsh blames a Greystone director for “everything,” the judge ruled, but he didn’t find the director “guilty of deceit or deliberate concealment”.

The case is part of the fallout from an investing boom that swept through the UK after then-chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown unveiled expanded film credits in his 1997 budget.

The UK government, seeing the credit was being used mostly to lower tax bills, tightened the rules in 2007.

The ex-trader, who was dismissed for gross misconduct, was found not guilty of tax fraud by a London jury in 2015.

Mr Walsh used to be “a successful and very highly paid equities trader,” the judge said in his ruling, and had “surplus cash to invest” because his only large outgoings were for mortgage interest and spending on holidays. He put more than £1m into a series of film schemes designed to enable participants to cut their income tax.

At first, the plans generated “a number of substantial payments” from the UK tax authority, but in the end they were “nothing short of catastrophic for him,” the judge said.

- Bloomberg