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Habitual conman Renwick Haddow has been hit with huge penalties for two investment frauds.

Investors put £28million into the two schemes, one supposedly a company that rented office space, another a platform for trading cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Store Inc.

The investments were sold by gushing cold callers at a third company, InCrowd Equity, which, unbeknown to investors, was also owned by Haddow.

According to court documents filed by the FBI in the United States, money from investors was meant to buy shares in Bitcoin Store but “Haddow appropriated all or nearly all of the funds” for expenses and commissions.

The UK arm of this operation, Bitcoin Store Limited, arranged to give £528,000 of investors’ money to InCrowd to pay its cold callers – a deal that was not revealed to investors.

The documents add that investors’ due diligence was hampered because the sales prospectus omitted Haddow’s name “and therefore his negative regulatory history”.

His cold callers claimed that BitCoin Store had a turnover of more than £5million, but in reality its bank account stood at £360.

Last month, several judgments were issued against the operations by a New York district judge, Lorna G Schofield.

Bitcoin Store was given a civil penalty of $1.5m while the office rental operation, Bar Works Inc, got hit for $42m in penalties and orders to return profits – a total of more than £31m.

Haddow, 49, has lived in London, Suffolk, Hong Kong and New York and, according to online reports, is currently in Morocco awaiting extradition to the United States.

His past has also caught up with him in the High Court in London.

Another of his multi-million pound scams was one that persuaded victims to put their savings into farmland in Australia and Lithuania.

But 65% of investor money disappeared in marketing costs, including commission for the sales reps, and no land was ever bought.

Now Haddow’s been banned from being a director for the maximum 15 years.

Deputy Registrar Baister told the High Court that he regretted that the ban could not be longer.

“This is fraudulent conduct of the nastiest kind,” he said.

“Misleading marketing material was disseminated to investors which seriously misrepresented to lay people the value of the investments…duping lay people into parting with their money.”

Mark Bruce, Chief Investigator at The Insolvency Service, said after the hearing: “I can only echo the words of the Deputy Registrar in this case, the evidence showed both that this entire investment was a fraud and that it was controlled by Mr Haddow.”

The court heard that Haddow acted as a director of Agri Firma Capital Limited even though he was already a banned director.

He was also named as the owner of the Capital Alternatives group of companies. As I’ve reported , this marketed investments in rice farms in Sierra Leone under the name African Land, pocketing 50% of investors’ money in fees.

More land was sold to investors than was owned by African Land, prompting Judge Nicholas Strauss in the High Court to remark: “This is not a comfortable situation.” It was ruled to be an unlawful investment scheme and shut down.