£72m fraud banker gets new finance job

Firm keeps clients in dark about his time in prison

A FORMER investment banker jailed for nine years for being behind Britain’s biggest attempted cash fraud of £72million has resumed a career in finance after his release.

Jagmeet Channa, who plundered accounts while at HSBC’s Canary Wharf headquarters, now deals – entirely legally – with clients and potential investors at a cryptocurrency firm.

The firm’s website gives no indication of his role in what the judge described as a ‘sophisticated criminal enterprise’ in 2008.

The site links to his profile on professional networking site LinkedIn, which claims he was working as a business analyst ‘across financial and banking change programmes’ when he was behind bars.

It adds: ‘I was in the heart of the belly of the beast and was able to understand how banking and finance actually functions on a global scale.’ But while disguising his past to clients, a source said that when hiring staff for the firm, Channa, now using the name Jag Singh, boasted about his criminal history and falsely claimed he had got away with the cash.

Channa, from Ilford, east London, is titled ICO Operations of Liquidcash, which promises a ‘payment system designed to bring crypto payments into the real world’. His online profile says his responsibilities include ‘project management of all key stake holdFrench ers’ and the first point of contact for potential investors.

It states that during the period he was in jail he was working as a business analyst for a firm called SK Berkeley.

The company was incorporated in December 2012, four years after he was jailed and two years after his LinkedIn CV said he left the firm.

In April 2008, the then 25year-old bank clerk, using colleagues’ passwords, wired £71,632,807 to a Barclays branch in Manchester and to a bank account in Morocco. It was more than 27 times the amount taken during the Great Train Robbery in 1963. But he forgot to change the account he had used to say zero balance, meaning two days later the debt was discovered and an investigation launched.

Channa told the Mail that his employers knew of his past, and his role was to build software, not related to finance.

He said his LinkedIn CV was not done ‘intentionally’ and he would fix it. He said he changed his name to make it more ‘dynamic’ and denied boasting about his criminal past when recruiting staff.