Edward “Fast Eddie” Davenport, the self-styled lord convicted in 2011 for masterminding a £4m fraud, has sold his London mansion to settle £13m of confiscation and compensation orders.
Davenport’s former 24-bedroom Marylebone home, 33 Portland Place, was the house where Colin Firth’s character had speech therapy in the film The King’s Speech. It was once the Sierra Leonean high commission until Davenport controversially acquired it for a below-market sum in 1999, while the west African country was in the middle of a civil war. The latest sale is thought to have fetched around £25m.
Under Davenport’s ownership, the house hosted celebrity parties and “upmarket” swingers events called Killing Kittens. It has also been used as the venue for music videos including Amy Winehouse’s Rehab, and for Kate Moss’s Agent Provocateur fashion shoot.
Davenport was convicted along with eight others for his role in Gresham Ltd, a company that purported to offer commercial loans, for which it sought “advance fee” payments from borrowers. The firm was falsely promoted as a long-established, wealthy and prestigious financial organisation capable of lending hundreds of millions of pounds as venture capital.
He was sentenced to seven years and eight months in prison in October 2011. Last year, the Serious Fraud Office’s proceeds of crime division applied for confiscation and compensation orders relating to the total benefit Davenport is believed to have derived from his schemes, rather than the £4m relating to his trial.
Davenport was released last year from Wandsworth prison after having a plea for clemency granted on the grounds of ill health.
In a separate case, the SFO said Virendra Rastogi, who was convicted and sentenced in 2008 for his role in a multimillion-pound financial trading fraud, paid £5.4m on Wednesday towards his £20m confiscation order.
