A heartless Edinburgh fraudster who conned a terminally ill pal out of almost £500,000 has been given one month to repay the victim’s family or face 19 months in jail.
Keith Cameron was caged back in 2015 for swindling his friend and neighbour Jonathan Speirs. The 61-year-old was slapped with a proceeds of crime order for £211,000 with the money to be returned to the Speirs family.
Jonathan, a world-famous lighting design architect whose work included the Millennium Dome, died of stomach cancer in 2012 aged 54. But Cameron has still to pay £22,000 despite the order being imposed more than six years ago.
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According to the Daily Record, Cameron appeared at Edinburgh Sheriff Court for a means hearing on Friday and represented himself. Fiscal depute Asif Rashie said prosecutors were aware of a sum of £20,948 being available to Cameron.
Mr Rashie said the cash was waiting in the bank to be claimed by Cameron from his late father’s estate. But Cameron told the court he couldn’t accept the money and use it to pay the Speirs family as he believed he was owed much more.
He claimed around £86,000 was due to him following his dad’s passing, adding the situation was a “mess” and needed to be sorted out first. Cameron, of the city’s Trinity area, told Sheriff Nigel Morrison QC he was “between a rock and hard place”.
But the sheriff dismissed Cameron’s claims, telling him: “This has gone on long enough.”
Sheriff Morrison said if Cameron failed to pay the money by September 9, he would be given the alternative of 568 days. Cameron owes £20,948 from the original order plus interest, taking the total to £22,073.
In April 2015 Cameron was jailed for five years for obtaining £476,874 from Jonathan by fraud between October 1 2009 and September 14 2012.
He was found guilty at Edinburgh Sheriff Court. His sentence was later reduced to four years on appeal.
Cameron persuaded Jonathan to invest in Chase Telecom Ltd, a firm he said he’d set up to obtain a lucrative contract to supply telecom services. He claimed other investors had invested millions and Jonathan could expect to receive £2 million within two years.
Cameron even sent out false documents to show the company was trading well.
He transferred Jonathan three payments totalling £75,935 as dividends which actually came from the victim’s own funds. During the trial, fiscal depute Gerard Drugan described Cameron as “a Walter Mitty character” who spent “astronomical amounts of money”.
Cameron’s home in Trinity was valued at more than £1m while his children went to a fee-paying school, holidays were spent in luxury villas in Portugal, and he bought expensive Swiss watches and dined in the best restaurants.
One of his daughters went to the Fame Academy in New York and stayed in a flat near the Empire State Building.
Cameron borrowed cash from his parents, neighbours and finance companies, such as Wonga, to support his lavish lifestyle and was declared bankrupt.
At the time, his crime left the Speirs family in a dire financial situation with Jonathan’s widow being forced to sell the family home.
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