Any Other Business | 17 May 2008

These days, Vesco the fugitive fraudster would have had a top job on Wall Street

So farewell, Robert Vesco, the fraudster, drug trafficker and fugitive from US justice whose death last year has been ‘confirmed by Cuban burial records’, according to the Daily Telegraph. Vesco absconded with $200 million of other people’s money — $60 million of it in banknotes in his excess baggage on a commercial flight — after looting Investor Overseas Services, the mutual-funds empire created but recklessly mismanaged by Bernie Cornfeld. Welcomed as a white knight when he gained control of IOS in 1970, Vesco proceeded to steal most of its remaining assets by selling them to fictitious companies as fast as he could print imaginative new letterheads. He referred to one of these companies as LPI — explaining, when asked, that it stood for Looting and Plundering International.

Vesco’s yacht, the 137ft Patricia III — which he arranged to have spirited away from US Customs in Florida after it had been confiscated — became a familiar sight in Caribbean havens where his money bought him protection. He settled in Cuba to become ‘de facto minister of corruption’, as one US politician described him, but eventually the Castro regime turned against him and jailed him for his part in a cancer-cure scam in which one of his partners was Richard Nixon’s brother Donald. The moustachioed Errol Flynn lookalike of the 1970s was a dishevelled figure by the time of his trial in 1995, but still it’s tempting to say they don’t make rogues like Vesco any more. The trouble is that they probably do, and his ilk today are not holed up in Havana but holding down senior jobs on Wall Street.

The principal of a famous seat of learning draws my attention to a speech by John Denham, secretary of state for Innovation, Universities and Skills, to the Higher Education Funding Council for England conference at Warwick University last month.