The Barlow Clowes scandal remembered

Investment Management Association chairman Douglas Ferrans this week said the scale of recent investment failures, including Keydata, was on a par with the Barlow Clowes scandal of the 1980s.

Some (most?) of you will be able to remember what Ferrans was talking about, but what exactly was Barlow Clowes, and what went wrong?

Investment broker Barlow Clowes collapsed in 1988. Nothing unusual about that.

Except the group of companies run by Peter Clowes (pictured) was found to have fraudulently misappropriated investors' funds.

So how did it entice investor cash in the first place?

Barlow Clowes offered the market a fund which purported to invest in low-risk Government gilt-edged stock, but promised a significantly higher yield than gilts were paying at the time.

As it turned out, the high returns promised by Clowes were down to the fact investors' cash had actually been put in very high risk projects.

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said Clowes was the "driver" behind the investment fraud.

He "simply stole investors' funds", according to the SFO, using more than £100m of his clients' money to fund a lavish lifestyle.

His fund was originally a 'bond washer', which transformed highly-taxed income into lightly-taxed capital gains.

When tax rules changed to outlaw this, Clowes began putting investments into various higher-risk assets to keep the scheme going.

When those assets were hit hard by the stock market crash in 1987, the scheme began to unravel.

At Clowes' trial at the Old Bailey in 1992, 113 witnesses testified against him. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

In 1989, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration published its probe into the Barlow Clowes affair. The report accused the Department of Trade and Industry of maladministration in its handling of the failed investment broker.

Though the government disputed the report, it agreed to make £153m in ex gratia payments to the 14,250 investors who had lost money in Barlow Clowes.

Speaking in February this year, financial secretary to the Treasury Mark Hoban said the decision to compensate investors was "based on an exceptional combination of circumstances" and should not be seen as a precedent.

Only in January 2011 did the Supreme Court of Gibraltar release the receivers and liquidators of the offshore portfolios promoted by Barlow Clowes.

This allowed the government to recover the £120m it had paid to investors from the public purse.

By February 2011, £156.5m had been paid to investors in total.