John Trevor Roche Baines (19 December 1939 – 1 August 2022) was a British convicted criminal, formerly a businessman, who claimed to have amassed an estimated fortune of over £130 million, through banking, financial trading, and investment in the Miss World competition.
[2] He was sentenced to six years imprisonment in November 2009 by a Manx Court, after it was determined that he was guilty of money laundering and false accounting.
[3] The prosecution alleged that once the funds came to be managed by or through him, he knew of the provenance of the fund and administered it with that knowledge (the level of knowledge required for criminal liability is suspicion, though that suspicion has to be proven beyond reasonable doubt).
[4] One of the two individuals, Roys Poyiadjis, responsible for the original scam was subsequently sentenced to a non-custodial term.
In order to fund his defence and shortly before trial he was alleged, with his wife, to have expropriated and handled almost £1.3m.