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.
[4] King first surfaced in the 1980s as chairman of Celebrity Group Holdings, a publishing company based in Kingston upon Thames,[5] which owned titles such as Basketball Monthly[6] and which was interested in taking over Eddy Shah's newspaper The Post[7] and Hamley's toy shop.
[17] In 2009, King pursued a series of new financial cons, building on founded a company called Swiss Commodity Holding (SCH), which claimed assets of $2 trillion besides the rights to all the gold, iron ore and coal in North Korea.
[2] 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.
While these negotiations were underway, King, representing SCH, visited North Korean Chairman Kim Yong-nam of the Supreme People's Assembly in Pyongyang.
[24][25] From around 2013, King operated the Middle East edition of a magazine called Food and Travel using different aliases and claiming false statistics on the publication's circulation numbers.
[26] He also launched a magazine called FT Business Arabia, falsely claiming it to be the Middle East version of the Financial Times in order to obtain millions of dollars in advertising revenue.
[27][28] In April 2019, King was sentenced to six years' imprisonment for stealing £670,000 from the Belgravia Group in 2008,[29][3] and in August 2019 he was told to pay back £320,000 or face additional time in jail.