Car hire conman who posed as Kuwaiti royal faces jail

A conman who posed as a member of the Kuwaiti royal family and enjoyed a champagne lifestyle during a £610,000 crime spree faces jail today.

Koroush Pour, 33, flitted from West End nightspots to St Tropez, where he once spent 10,000 on a bottle of champagne. The Iranian-born fraudster conned a series of victims by claiming to have a trust fund worth tens of millions of pounds.

Southwark crown court heard that Pour ran a company in Kensington specialising in high value cars. As the head of Swift Hire, he used the identities of previous customers to take out loans from financial group Lombard North Central to buy new cars and then sold them on without clearing previous finance agreements. This fraud earned Pour £460,000. In a second racket he persuaded two nurses, Martyn York and John Mercy, to part with their life savings of £150,000. Pour promised to secure them a high-yield return on the currency exchange market but they received nothing. Of the money stolen, £122,000 is still missing.

Pour, of Downpatrick, County Down, has admitted two counts of fraudulent trading and one of fraud between January 2006 and October last year and was being sentenced today.

Charles Langley, defending, said that some of the money lost by Lombard North Central had been paid back after the sale of some of Swift Hire’s cars.

Detective Inspector Perry Stokes, of the City of London Police fraud squad, said: “While it lasted Koroush Pour enjoyed a champagne lifestyle funded by other people’s money. Now, however, the party is over and all that Mr Pour has to look forward to is a prison sentence.”

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