Daily London
A former laundromat owner turned Ponzi scheme operator has been sentenced to 14 years behind bars after swindling millions of dollars from would-be investors and friends.
Chris Marco was found guilty of 43 fraud charges after illegally accepting more than $34 million from six client-victims to whom he promised healthy returns from investment schemes that did not exist.
The 67-year-old was sentenced in Western Australia’s Supreme Court on Thursday to 14 years’ imprisonment, eligible for parole after 12 years.
All up, Marco accepted $253 million from investors, repaying almost $200 million of it, over an almost eight-year period to 2018, before the corporate watchdog caught up with him and he declared bankruptcy.
He invested less than five per cent of the funds and made no profit despite guaranteeing his victims high rates of return from exclusive schemes not available to the public, Justice Natalie Whitby said.
“Your offending involved a gross abuse of trust that the victims had placed in you and that you fostered,” she said.
“You developed friendships with many of your victims, and your reputation and standing in the community were factors that enabled you to gain their trust.
“Then you defrauded each of them of large sums of money.”
Whitby said he knew what he told his victims was untrue, and he paid returns from their own and other investors’ funds.
This was done to enable him to continue his fraudulent scheme, as was Marco’s claims about future investment opportunities to induce his victims to roll over their funds and remain in the scheme, she said.
He told his victims he was a successful private investor and that through decades of investing, he had developed relationships that enabled him to gain access to risk-free and exclusive private placement programs, Whitby said.
He also claimed to be a high-wealth businessman who had made large sums of money from investing.
In reality, he was an “unremarkable” country boy who owned and operated 16 businesses, including video shops, laundromats and newspaper rounds, before turning his hand to financial services and fraud.
“You spent the money … which you obtained from the victims on repaying victims and other investors, on real estate, cars, collectibles, shares and personal expenditure,” Whitby said.
“You did not receive any returns from any purported investments that were deposited into your bank accounts in the entire period.”
Outside court, Marco’s lawyer, Luka Margaretic, was scathing of the sentence and said his client would appeal against it and his convictions.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in 35 years of practice,” he told reporters.
“After a sentence like that, he’s obviously not doing very well.
“There’s going to be an appeal against sentence as well as conviction.”
