'Lord' guilty of £229m theft bid

Bow-tied Hugh Rodley, whose aristocratic pretensions are based on a manorial title, teamed up with a gang of internet raiders targeting a £229 million Japanese bank fortune.

Their audacious plot came within a whisker of success and was foiled only at the last minute by the complexities of inter-bank money transfers, and Rodley has now been convicted of conspiracy to defraud.

London's Snaresbrook Crown Court heard that while Rodley used a Soho sex shop boss to help front "recipient" bank accounts for the hoped-for windfall, an insider at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation unlocked its London offices so fellow conspirators could make "surreptitious" night-time visits.

Once there, they used special software to corrupt the bank's computer system, record the keystrokes of staff and discover user names and passwords.

That enabled access to the holdings of major companies such as Toshiba International, Nomura Asset Management and Sumitomo Chemical UK, and the gang then made repeated attempts to electronically transfer up to £12.5 million at a time around the world.

"Fortunately for the bank, the... transfers failed to go through as a result of field logging errors," said Simon Farrell QC, prosecuting.

In the dock with Rodley, 61, of Church End, Twyning, Tewkesbury, were sex shop owner David Nash, 47, from Shelby Road, Durrington, West Sussex, and Swedish national Inger Malmros, 58, who lives in Gran Canaria.

Rodley was convicted of conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to transfer criminal property between January 1 and October 5 2004, while Nash was acquitted of the first charge but convicted of the second. They will be sentenced on Thursday alongside three fellow conspirators.

Malmros was cleared of both counts after explaining she knew nothing of two instructions purportedly from her company concerning the planned transfer of some of the Japanese bank's cash.