David Elias was declared dead after a bout of pneumonia in May 2009. He was living as a fugitive in Singapore and his ashes were purportedly scattered in the Malaysian rain forest on Borneo.
The financier was said to be behind one of the biggest personal finance frauds in recent years.
Investigators at the Serious Fraud Office probing the collapse of investment firm Keydata, to which Elias was linked, were reported yesterday to have ‘serious doubts’ that he is dead.
One is understood to believe that he may have faked his own death ‘Reggie Perrin-style’ and is at large in Asia.
The City watchdog has been following the money trail left by Elias in the hope of uncovering the £100million taken from savers during the fraud in the 1990s. They are now believed to be hunting him.
In the television show The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, the principal character fakes his suicide by drowning, leaving clothes and personal effects on a beach, to escape the mundanity of his job and day-to-day life.
Elias’s suspected ruse also recalls the disappearance of Lord Lucan, who went missing in 1974 after the murder of his children’s nanny. He was never seen again.
Eight years ago Elias, a former associate of restaurant critic Egon Ronay, emerged from his hideaway promising to write a ‘warts and all’ expose of his life and the people he had done deals with. He named a number of prominent British business figures who he claimed had threatened to kill him.
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He said he was living in Borneo but travelled frequently to Europe, although he was unable to return to Britain because of these threats.
Keydata was an investment marketing firm which focused on complex high-income bonds that were sold via a chain of independent financial advisers and managed by SLS Capital.
This was a Luxembourg-based firm part-owned by Elias. The bonds were billed as low risk investments and promised a 7.5 per cent return. Keydata had about 85,000 investors, many of them elderly savers wooed by this high return.
Martin Clunes as Reggie Perrin in the BBC's remake of the series
But the firm was put into administration after an investigation by the Financial Services Authority revealed that £103million of life insurance policies may have been misappropriated.
In June 2009 the FSA applied for Keydata’s closure ‘to protect investors’, saying it was concerned about ‘potentially missing assets’. The firm was fast-tracked into administration. Over the past year more than £300million has been paid out by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme to investors who lost money.
Norwich and Peterborough building society was fined £1.4million for the way it sold Keydata products.
But not everyone at the SFO is convinced Elias is still alive.
One source said yesterday: ‘His death was timely from his point of view. There’s always a question over people who die in convenient circumstances but all the information suggests he is dead.’
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