A convicted fraudster who bilked the Bermuda Government out of $2 million has been ordered to pay back $820,000 after his assets were seized.
Jeffrey Bevan, 52 was jailed for seven years and four months in Britain in January last year after he pleaded guilty to the scam.
He was back in court last week to appear before the Cardiff Crown Court for a Proceeds of Crime hearing, where the judge ordered him to repay the amount within three months or face another five years in jail.
According to online news reports out of Wales, including the
The court heard that Bevan, an accountant with a gambling addiction, made off with money out of Bermuda’s public purse to live an extravagant lifestyle with expensive cars, lavish vacations and buying shares in racehorses.
He was prosecuted in Britain with the co-operation of local authorities because he took the money he swindled home with him.
Bevan, of Wales, worked as a payments manager for the Accountant General’s Office of the Bermuda Government in January 2011 on a salary of $100,000 a year.
As a “trusted” member of staff, the Crown said the father of two was employed to implement a new finance system as an “expert” with the “know-how to cover his tracks”.
The Crown also said that Bevan built himself a small empire in the UK after he invested “a big chunk of the cash in houses and penthouse apartments” and took his family on lavish vacations in the Caribbean, the US and Europe.
He was said to have booked more than 18,000 bets online between 2009 and 2014 and lost $600,000.
Bevan pleaded guilty to three counts of transfer of criminal property and ten counts of conversion of criminal property.
On passing sentence, the judge told him that he was “driven by greed”.
The court also heard that Bevan cheated his own mother out of $62,000 after he arrived back in Britain in 2013.
She was persuaded by her son to give him the money after he lied to her and said that he was going to invest it before she died in her seventies.
Bevan was jailed for an additional 18 months last November, after he was found guilty of theft following a trial, with orders to pay his mother’s estate $42,000 at the Proceeds of Crime hearing.
