Eight years in jail for fraudster feld

By Helen Conway

Robert Feld, the jailed former boss of Resort Hotels, is to come before Wood Green Crown Court in London on 2 June for a confiscation hearing to determine the full extent of his remaining assets.

Feld's lawyers maintain the convicted fraudster lost "everything" with the collapse of the hotel group but this will be challenged by the Serious Fraud Office.

The confiscation hearing will be held before Judge Kenneth Zucker QC, the same judge who last week sentenced Feld at Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court to eight years' imprisonment after finding him guilty on nine counts of using forged documents and three counts of making false statements in financial documents.

Feld, 45, was also disqualified from being a company director for 10 years.

Passing sentence on Tuesday, Judge Zucker told Feld: "Anyone acquainted with the facts of this case or anyone who has heard you give evidence will know that you are a man of quite appalling dishonesty."

He added: "I take your previous good character into account, take your family circumstances into account, but I regard this case as a very serious example of a director of a public company flagrantly abusing the trust that was put in him."

The offences took place between April and August 1992 when Feld was seeking to raise £20.6m for Resort from a rights issue of new shares.

In the rights issue circular, the profit forecast of £6m to the year ending 30 April 1992 was overstated by £1.6m. The liabilities were understated by £9.5m and the cash balances were overstated by £4m.

Feld owned more than 1.3 million shares, making him the largest personal shareholder in the company. He had personal debts of over £1m.

During the 80-day trial, evidence was given of Feld's lavish lifestyle, which was solely funded by Resort. He had two houses in East Sussex, one in Knightsbridge, London, and a fourth in the south of France. He also had a yacht moored in France.

Resort Hotels had debts of around £140m when it went into receivership in June 1994. Most of the properties had previously been bought by Jarvis hotels.

The sole compensation for Resort's 6,000 small shareholders, many of them pensioners, was a £250 voucher to spend at Jarvis Hotels.

Feld protested his innocence throughout the trial and tried to pin the blame on fellow directors and employees, as well as on employees - including a senior partner - at the group's accountancy firm Coopers & Lybrand.