A fortune made from timeshare fraud

The wealthiest criminal in the UK is fraudster John Palmer, with an estimated wealth of £300m, according the Underworld Rich List compiled for a BBC series.

UNDERWORLD RICH LIST Fraud: John Palmer (pictured above), worth £300m Drug trafficking: Brian Brendan Wright, worth £100m Smuggling: Tom "Slab" Murphy, worth £35-40m from cigarette and oil smuggling Full list

John "Goldfinger" Palmer is a rich man. Not only is he the number one fraudster in the BBC's rich list of the UK's criminal classes, he is the wealthiest villain overall.

His fortune has been estimated as bigger than the Queen's, with assets including a leased private Lear jet, two helicopters, a chateau in France with its own golf course, a fleet of flash cars, various properties in Tenerife and around England, including a mansion worth more than £1m near Bath.

Now in his 50s, Palmer was one of seven children brought up by his mother in Olton, near Birmingham. His family had no money. Compounding this apparently unpromising start was the fact that he's dyslexic.

His old school friend Stephen Marland says the turn-around in Palmer's fortunes is "absolutely mind-blowing".

"Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought he'd have been on that scale of richness."

Mr Marland remembers his friend regularly falling asleep in class. "John got away with it quite often. The teacher would be talking to you about something and John's head would be on the desk."

Big time

It was 1983 when Palmer was propelled into the big time. He had gone into the gold and jewellery business with his friend, Garth Chappell. Both were relatively unknown to the law enforcement agencies - until £26m worth of gold bullion was stolen from a cargo storage company at Heathrow.

The scam involved Tenerife timeshares

It was the UK's biggest robbery, and Palmer was arrested for his part in helping smelt the gold.

"When the officers raided Palmer's home in Bath, we found a smelt in the back garden and there were actually two warm bars of gold under the sofa," says former Metropolitan police commander Roy Ramm. Although Chappell was convicted, Palmer managed to walk free - and headed to Tenerife, the scene of his most lucrative enterprise.

There he set up a vast timeshare scam that eventually conned at least 16,000 victims. Targeting holidaymakers who already owned timeshare apartments on the Spanish island, Palmer's sales team introduced them to apparently independent companies that could sell their timeshares at a fantastic profit - while encouraging them to buy new, better timeshares from Palmer.

But there was no intention of selling the old timeshares. This was the scam. Among those taken in was Edward Jenkins, a Dunkirk war veteran and ex-professional golfer, who found himself paying for two properties.

"They promised me the earth," he says. "It was too good to be true - in fact it was too good to be true.

"When I got home I sent them the amount they wanted per month, which was £500 to £700 for buying the new apartment. I thought it was the best bit of business I'd ever done in my life."

BBC reporter Raphael Rowe tapped the underworld connections made when he himself was in jail

But the resale companies were nothing more than empty shells controlled by Palmer himself. Over seven years not a single resale was completed.

In 1997 Palmer was arrested in Tenerife, and returned to the UK to face charges of fraud on a massive scale.

He chose to defend himself, and in May 2001 was sentenced to eight years in prison and ordered to pay a record confiscation order of £33m. This was overturned on appeal because of a technicality, and Palmer could be out as early as next year to resume his lavish lifestyle.

But whether he can escape the wrath of his victims is another question. Many are bringing a multi-party civil case against him to try to recover their stolen money.

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Underworld Rich List will be broadcast in the UK on BBC Three at 2100 BST on Monday 17 May.