Solicitor lived in luxury £5m Lake District estate while fleecing investors

A conman who used millions of pounds of investors money to fund his luxury lifestyle has been jailed for 14 years.

The Serious Fraud Office said former solicitor Schools was an investment manager for the Cayman Island-based Axiom Legal Financing Fund. He was convicted by a jury at Southwark Crown Court on five counts of fraudulent trading, fraud by abuse of position and money laundering and was sentenced today .The Axiom Fund was set up in 2009 by Schools to provide loans to law firms pursuing no-win-no-fee cases.

He used funds received by ATM Solicitors to pay himself over £1 million in salary, consultancy fees and other personal benefits. The cases Axiom funded were not independently vetted, often failed at court and case insurance policies failed to pay out when cases did not succeed. The number of clients whose cases were affected by the fraud is in the range of 35,000. The SFO investigation found Schools dishonestly acquired over £19.6 million from the Axiom loan monies, including more than £5.7 million from audit and management fees he dishonestly added to the law firm loans.

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