An individual who ran a £2.7mn investment fraud and was jailed for nine years has now been banned by the Financial Conduct Authority.
On February 3, Clint Canning, 45, of Barnston, Dunmow, was sentenced to nine years in prison and handed a 15-year director disqualification at Southwark Crown Court for conspiracy to commit fraud after being found guilty at the same court on December 15, 2022.
Canning, using the name Clint Foster, played a part in setting up a company called Base2Trade, which claimed to invest in the binary options market between 2014 to 2015 - a form of fixed-odds betting.
A statement from the City of London Police said a total of 175 known victims invested a total of £2,718,590 in the company.
Approximately 60 per cent of the victims were aged 50 and above.
On Friday (February 16) the FCA prohibited Canning, also known as Christian Beauchamp and Clint Foster, from performing any function in relation to any regulated activity.
A notice from the regulator read: “Taking into account the nature of the offences Mr Canning participated in and the serious conviction arising from his participation, and his lack of fitness and propriety due to his dishonesty and lack of integrity, the authority considers it is appropriate to prohibit Mr Canning from performing any function in relation to any regulated activity carried on by an authorised person, exempt person or exempt professional firm.”
The notice set out that Canning was disqualified from acting as a company director for eight years by the High Court of Justice in March 2017.
After this, he changed his name to Christian Beauchamp and in 2019 and became the company director of another firm, in contravention of the 2017 disqualification.
He was the sole director of this company, registered with the FCA, between May 2020 and February 2021.
On May 19, 2021, at Southwark Crown Court, under the name Christian Beauchamp, he was convicted of one count of contravening a disqualification order and sentenced to a year in prison.
On December 15, 2022, Canning was convicted at Southwark Crown Court of one count of conspiring to dishonestly make a false representation and intending to make a gain for himself or another, or to cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss.
After the February 3 sentencing, Detective Inspector Gareth Dothie, from the fraud operations team at the City of London Police, said Canning was a "career criminal".
He added: "We hope that the sentence handed down by the court goes some way to help the victims rebuild their lives."
tara.o'connor@ft.com
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