Men jailed over $2.5 trillion fraud

The court heard Graham Halksworth "succumbed to greed"

A former forensic document examiner has been jailed for six years for his role in a $2.5 trillion scam.

Graham Halksworth, 69, from Greater Manchester, helped pioneer fingerprint evidence before getting involved in one of the world's biggest potential frauds.

He worked with former Yugoslav government agent Michael Slamaj, who ran an engineering firm in Vancouver, Canada, to perpetrate the scam, which involved bogus US Treasury bonds.

The men were convicted last month of conspiracy to defraud, after they tried to sell some of the false documents - which carried a face value greater than the world's gold stocks.

Halksworth was sentenced at Snaresbrook Crown Court, London, on Friday, along with Slamaj, who was also jailed for six years.

At an earlier hearing the court heard the scam began to unravel when two men tried to cash $25m worth of the fake bonds at a Canadian bank in February 2001.

Plane crash

Halksworth, from Mossley, was caught after a simple spelling mistake, when some of the high denomination bonds were spotted with "dollar" on them, instead of "dollars".

At their trial both men insisted the bonds were genuine, claiming the US government issued them to Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalist government in the 1940s in a secret attempt to undermine the communist revolution in China.

The jury heard the plane carrying the bonds crashed on the Filipino island of Mindanao in 1948.

Slamaj then said the bonds were recovered by locals, before they were handed to him by a tribal elder.

Inkjet printer

But Detective Inspector Roger Cook later told the court the bonds were fake, produced on an inkjet printer with spelling mistakes and included zip codes - not introduced in the US until 1963.

He said the defendants had been "corrupted by greed" and had taken advantage of people's gullibility.

Halksworth was arrested in May 2001, when City of London Police were tipped off by the Hong Kong authorities after two Australians were arrested with bonds and a certificate signed by Halksworth.

The bonds had a face value of $2.5 trillion

Slamaj was then detained in March 2002, when a London solicitor tipped off police when he became suspicious about a transaction he had been asked to broker for him.

Judge William Birtles said both men had succumbed to "greed" and he said he had no choice but to hand out lengthy custodial sentences.

Halksworth, whose wife suffers from bowel cancer, shook his head after the sentence was announced and muttered: "This will kill her".

His lawyer, Ravi Dogra, in his mitigation speech, had argued for a suspended sentence and said Mrs Halksworth relied heavily on her husband and would be unfairly punished if he was sent to jail.