The restriction came in 2013, after he played a leading role in what the Insolvency Service described as a ‘£7million land-banking scam’. Using a variety of business names including Ultraclass, Burnhill Land Investments, and The Property Partnership, he and his crew sold plots of vastly overpriced land with false claims about its development potential. One investor paid £10,000 for a strip of land near Towcester in Northamptonshire, only to find that the council had already banned building even a fence on it, and its real value was about £75.