Swiss bank account mystery of man in Owls bid

The Official Receiver was granted an extension to Geoff Sheard’s bankruptcy following a heated court hearing during which he was persistently challenged over the existence of the account which he had used to persuade creditors to invest with him.

Mr Sheard told the court a laptop which held information about the account had “completely stopped working” last summer and all the data had been lost.

Lancaster County Court heard that Mr Sheard was unable to provide the bank account number, had never received any statements and had never had online access to the account.

In a witness statement, Mr Sheard said he had around £400,000 in the Swiss account which he believed he was due in consultancy fees connected with an attempt to broker a takeover of Sheffield Wednesday in 2008.

He said his fees were owed from a Swiss-based fund which had claimed it had £50m available to buy the Owls.

His statement said he could now see “that I had no evidence of the existence of my funds” but at the time the people he was dealing with at the fund “appeared entirely plausible”.

The court heard Mr Sheard, who lives in Lancaster, had arranged for David Mortimer, a friend from his local cricket club, to invest £70,000 into the Swiss fund.

Mr Sheard’s witness statement said he authorised the fund to use £75,000 of the money he said existed in his Swiss account to invest on his friend’s behalf because “for some reason Mr Mortimer’s funds could not be immediately accessed” and “there appeared to be some urgency in respect of timescales”.

A few days later, Mr Mortimer paid £70,000 into Mr Sheard’s personal bank account in the UK as a “refund” for the investment made on his behalf. The money has never been returned to him, despite him seeking to withdraw his investment.

Mr Mortimer is one of a string of creditors owed money by Mr Sheard, who was declared bankrupt in April last year.

The court heard football agent Philip Morrison, based in Surrey, claimed he was owed in excess of 300,000 euros advanced to Mr Sheard in connection with the attempt to buy Sheffield Wednesday.

Wakefield-based accountant David Harrison is also claiming an amount not disclosed during the hearing, along with a relative of Mr Sheard’s estranged wife who is claiming £10,000 which has not been recovered after Mr Sheard arranged for the amount to be invested in a bond scheme.

Asked if he had simply used the £10,000 for his own ends, Mr Sheard told the court: “I did not use it to pay off my personal debt. I used it in the way we agreed to use it.”

Mr Sheard said he had engaged a firm of international debt recovery agents called Coburn and Kuhn, based in Monaco, in February 2010 to recover money from the Swiss fund. He indicated the agents might have details of the account but he had been unable to contact them recently.

At the end of the hearing District Judge Robert Forrester suspended the automatic discharge of Mr Sheard’s bankruptcy because his failure to provide information was likely to impede investigations by the Official Receiver. He was ordered to produce more information on his financial affairs, in particular in relation to the Swiss account.