KALLAKIS: MANAGER DID NOT AUTHORISE DEALS
The deputy managing director of the world’s second largest property development firm said he did not authorise guarantees used by two alleged fraudsters to obtain £740m of bank loans.
Achilleas Kallakis and Alexander Williams, both 44, are alleged to have conned Allied Irish Bank into parting with the money in a ‘large scale financial fraud’.
They are accused of using forged document to secure the cash to buy 16 high-end properties across the UK, including the headquarters of the Daily Telegraph, in Buckingham Palace Road.
Among the alleged bogus paperwork were deeds of guarantee said to have been signed by bosses at Hong Kong based property developers Sun Hung Kai Properties.
But Mike Wong, of SHKP, said he had not signed off any documents and had no knowledge of Kallakis or Williams and had never done business with either man.
He said: ‘All those signatures that resemble mine actually were not done by me.’
Asked by prosecutor Victor Temple QC if he had ever authorised anyone to sign the documents on his behalf he replied ‘No, I did not’.
He went on to tell the court that he had checked a company seal purportedly from SHKP used on the documents against the genuine SHKP seal and had been able to ‘spot the difference’.
Mr Wong told the court, via video-link from Hong Kong: ‘I’m not able to tell you the exact differences today, however, at the time when I was shown the purported seal as well as the genuine seal when the comparison was made I was able to tell the difference.
Prosecutors say Kallakis and Williams used a ‘man of Chinese appearance’ who used the name Jonathan Lee to pose as a SHKP director.
Mr Wong was asked: ‘As far as you are aware did anybody by the name of Jonathan Lee work for SHKP during 2007 as a senior director?’
He said: ‘I do not think there was such a person’.
He told the court that he had had no dealings with AIB until the bank contacted SHKP’s legal department in 2008 after they uncovered the alleged fraud.
Prosecutors say AIB lost £56m after it was forced to sell on the property portfolio Kallakis and Williams bought when accusations the duo had used false documentation to secure the loans emerged.
Among the properties were landmark buildings, including Lunar House, in Croydon, the Home Office’s asylum processing centre, and the headquarters of the Daily Telegraph, in Buckingham Palace Road.
It is also claimed Royal Bank of Scotland lost around 5m Euros after loaning more 26m Euros to the pair to convert a an ex-passenger ferry into a luxury yacht.
Kallakis, of (2) Brompton Square, in Chelsea, and Williams of (21) Epirus Road, in Fulham, both in south west London, deny two counts of conspiracy to defraud, thirteen counts of forgery, five counts of fraud, two counts of money laundering and one count of obtaining a money transfer by deception.
The trial continues.
