Giovanni Di Stefano (fraudster)

[citation needed] In 1992 his bid to buy the MGM movie studios failed, and he fled to Yugoslavia because that country's breakup had made it a war zone and nobody would look for him there.

[25] On 27 March 2013 he was convicted on 25 charges including deception, fraud and money laundering between 2001 and 2011 by a jury at Southwark Crown Court in London.

During the trial he had told the court of his links to Robert Mugabe, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein (whom he described as a "nice guy") and his "friendship" with the daughter of Slobodan Milošević.

The money was sent to a bank in Rome by Penchef's parents, but prosecutor David Aaronberg QC said: "Mr Di Stefano did little or nothing to assist."

[28] Notable people whom Giovanni Di Stefano has claimed to represent include: He has written to the Parole Board requesting Great Train Robbery participant Ronnie Biggs's release on compassionate grounds.

[22][30] This, and an incident in a 2004 trial of John Palmer, prompted an investigation into Di Stefano's qualifications as lawyer (see "personal legal history" section).

[22][48][49] On 17 March 2007, Di Stefano wrote to Lord Goldsmith (at that time the Attorney General for England and Wales) asking for leave to prosecute Judge Rauf Rashid Abd al-Rahman, who had sentenced Saddam Hussein, under the Geneva Conventions Act 1957.

[51] In January 2007 Di Stefano asked the International Criminal Court to make a full investigation of the Al-Dujail trials of Saddam Hussein's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Iraq's judiciary head Awad Hamed al-Bandar.

[52] Di Stefano circulated a note handwritten by Barzan where he explains that he wasn't responsible for the killings at Dujail for which he was sentenced to death.

[60] On 15 January 2008 Di Stefano said that he knew of a sixth victim of Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley called Jennifer Tighe.

[70] Di Stefano claimed in a BBC article that the conviction was quashed on a second appeal in 1988 and that "a sense of injustice remains, making each victory against the system a sweet revenge.

[79] In 1990, Giovanni Di Stefano travelled to New Zealand, where he made several multimillion-dollar bids on property on behalf of a Beverly Hills-based company.

[85][86] The address listed in his passport was Tolstojeva 32, Belgrade, right next to Milošević's official residence; however, he lived further away, at the luxurious Genex apartments.

[87] According to The Scotsman and Irish Independent, Di Stefano was moving to a country with no extradition treaty with the UK, to escape a warrant for fraud charges.

[17][88] In November 1999 Di Stefano was arrested in Rome and extradited to Britain to be tried for fraud charges in the insolvency in 1991 of five hotels in the English Midlands and a company called Sandhurst Assets.

[17][85] British investigators recognised his name when newspapers reported his bids for Dundee football club and for Ellington Colliery, and acted on a 1991 warrant.

[85][89] In June 2001, after Di Stefano had spent 18 months in jail, a judge ruled that he couldn't be tried because too much time had passed since the alleged offences.

[102] Alistair Cooke, co-director of the BBC series that made a documentary about Di Stefano said "(...) We witnessed him in court, but he never actually stands up and pretends to be a lawyer.

[111] According to a statement by the Spanish Interior Ministry, quoting the arrest warrant, Di Stefano was accused of having earned large sums of money in the UK between 2004 and 2009 without being licensed to practise law in that country.

[124][125] On 6 March 2013 he told the court that he was a qualified advocate because Yugoslavian president Milošević had awarded him an honorary law doctorate from the University of Belgrade "simply because he had asked.

[6] He subsequently pleaded guilty to two additional counts: defrauding a couple out of £160,000, including a woman's life savings of £75,000, and stealing £150,000 from a man who had been in a car accident and lost a limb.

Judge Alistair McCreath said that Di Stefano had caused misery and frustration to many people and called him a predator for his treatment of "desperate and vulnerable" clients: "You had no regard for them nor for their anguish.

He described Di Stefano's crimes as "planned and persistent," his defence in court as "breathtakingly cynical,"[21] and his overall conduct as showing "greed, dishonesty and utter disregard for the sensibilities of others.

"[127] Hilary Ryan, from the Crown Prosecution Service's organised crime division, said: "For many years, Giovanni Di Stefano described himself to potential clients as a lawyer and usually as an Italian 'avvocato'.

The judge who jailed him in March 2013 at Southwark Crown Court, Alistair McCreath, told him to "pay back £1.4 million forthwith or serve the extra time."

[129] When he went back to Italy to the region of his birth, he bought the local team Campobasso Calcio;[18] the club had to close a year later due to financial problems.

[133] The board finally rejected the bid when it was made public that he was a friend of Serbian warlord Arkan, and that Suffolk Constabulary had issued an extradition warrant for fraud charges dating back to 1991.

[130] Initially the club attracted big-name players such as Craig Burley and Fabrizio Ravanelli but it quickly ran into financial difficulties; 15 senior players were released from their contracts,[139] the Scottish Football Association refused to confirm his appointment as director because his fraud convictions didn't qualify him as a "fit and proper person" as required by article 10 of its rules.

[147] In February 2011 the French magazine So Foot published an interview stating that Di Stefano was considering a bid with others to acquire a stake in AS Monaco FC and multi branding the football club with his record companies.

[158] In a November 2007 interview with Dublin's Hot Press magazine's senior editor Jason O'Toole, Di Stefano expressed an interest in running in the Republic of Ireland in the European Union elections with an anti-immigration manifesto.