PESTANO: CROOKED BUSINESSMAN JAILED, BUT HE ONLY HAS TO PAY BACK £1

A businessman who cheated the taxman out of £152,000 running plush events for London diplomats has been ordered to repay just £1.

Wesley Pestano lived the high life putting on champagne receptions for ambassadors and lobbyists while inflating his company’s sales and expense figures, the Old Bailey heard.

The 43-year-old, who ran events for the prestigious London Diplomatic Association, ‘plucked figures out of thin air’ to support his bogus claims for VAT rebates for his subcontractor, GDA Holdings Ltd.

Suspicious revenue officials were told that his accounts were lost in a computer crash, and later that his own staff were responsible for the scam.

He denied the charges but was found guilty of cheating the public revenue and fraud following a trial before the Old Bailey.

Jailing him for three years and three months, and disqualifying him from being a company director for 12 years, Judge Paul Worsley QC said Pestano ‘enjoyed a lifestyle of chauffeur-driven cars and smart hotels.’

He said: ‘Sometimes people set up legitimate companies and get into difficulties thereafter but I am entirely satisfied that this company was dishonest from the start.

‘It never made money and what you were doing was fraudulent from the outset.

‘A prison sentence is necessary in circumstances such as these, and it is, for a man who has never been in prison before, a substantial one.

‘I also impose a nominal £1 collection.’

The LDA website quotes a glittering array of testimonials, including former CHASE hospice chief executive Chris Robinson praising Pestano’s ‘invaluable guidance and advice’.

Other tributes for the events, whose venues included the 5-star Mayfair Hotel and Grange Park Opera, in Northington, Hampshire,  also came from the ambassadors of Nepal and South Korea.

In exchange for an annual membership fee of £58.75, diplomats are promised invitations to ‘exclusive sporting, social and cultural events’.

The court heard that the fraud ran from from 2005 to 2009, and came after Pestano was fined for another £150,000 tax scam in 2003.

Tax inspectors were also forced to write off an unpaid £259,000 bill in 2004 after the divorced father-of-one put another firm, the ‘executive gold club’, into liquidation.

Companies can legitimately claim back VAT for the purchase of certain goods if they are used for business purposes.

But after officials began questioning his claims in September 2009, Pestano failed to respond to requests for a full set of invoices and the contact details of his suppliers and customers.

He then falsely claimed his records had been lost when an office was repossessed, and insisted he had lost all his data the previous day in a computer crash – claiming no backups were kept for ‘confidentiality reasons’.

It later emerged that his computer had broken down a month before, and Pestano had asked a computer repair firm to recover only his e-mails – and no other files.

Mark LR Mullins, prosecuting, told the court that the conman had ‘simply plucked the figures for his returns out of thin air.’

He said: ‘The undertaking each VAT return was signed by Mr Pestano declaring that the information given to be true and complete.

‘He knew perfectly well that the information was not true and complete and was being dishonest by signing the form.’

Following his arrest, Pestano, who ran the business from his mother’s Hammersmith home, told decetives that one of his three staff must have been responsible for the fraud.

‘Obviously they were there, they asked questions, they saw the set up of our office,’ he said.

‘Day to day, I had nothing to do with accounts – I purely was presented with figures and I signed them off.’

David Brock, defending, insisted that that GDA Holdings had been started as a legitimate enterprise but became ‘riddled with debt’ as the recession started to bite.

‘It is clear he struggled unsuccesfully to run a number of businesses,’ he said.

‘That’s why he’s here, because he continued to try to run businesses which couldn’t be possible in the present climate.

‘That exposed him to the possibility of claming VAT that he shouldn’t have claimed

Pestano, of (Flat 2), 18 Lion Gate Gardens, Kew, Surrey, denied cheating the public revenue and two counts of fraud by false representation.

ends