Jack Mayer has been returned to the UK from Italy and ordered to serve a six-year prison sentence imposed after his 2013 conviction in a money-laundering case connected with a payment-diversion fraud.
Return to the Old Bailey
Mayer, 56, appeared at the Old Bailey on 22 September after his extradition from Italy. The hearing brought him back before the court more than a decade after he failed to attend his original trial at the Central Criminal Court. The six-year term was imposed in his absence following that trial; the recent order requires him to serve it.
The case is a significant cross-border enforcement development rather than a newly imposed sentence. The court appearance follows his arrest in Milan in June and his return to Britain. No new charge or additional UK sentence has been announced in connection with the September hearing.
Inquiry began with suspicious banking activity
The City of London Police investigation began in 2011 after suspicious transactions exposed a payment-diversion fraud aimed at a company bank account in Switzerland. The underlying scheme concerned more than £1.7 million, described as the sterling equivalent of about €2 million.
Investigators established that business accounts had been opened using falsified bank statements and payslips. Those accounts were then used to receive funds taken in the fraud. Digital work identified alterations to genuine financial documents, including changes which made them appear to show salary payments and multi-million-dollar balances during the account-opening process.
Funds were moved on through UK and overseas accounts within days of their receipt. Banks detected suspicious activity and stopped further attempts to transfer hundreds of thousands of pounds, limiting the movement of money beyond the initial diversion.
Evidence gathered during the case
The inquiry also recovered altered passports, forged paperwork and manipulated financial records. Investigators linked material in the case to more than one false identity and found £55,000 in cash in a safety-deposit box connected with the investigation. Those findings formed part of the evidence trail surrounding the laundering operation, rather than a separate allegation arising from the new hearing.
Mayer had been granted bail ahead of the 2013 trial but left the UK days before it began. He was convicted in his absence and the six-year term was imposed at that time. The September appearance resolves the outstanding question of enforcing that existing sentence after his return to the country.
A long international chronology
The London case was not the only occasion on which Mayer faced proceedings abroad. In 2014, a court in Pennsylvania sentenced him to 15 to 30 years after convictions including theft by deception, dealing in unlawful proceeds, conspiracy and corrupt-organisation offences arising from a lottery fraud. The UK case records his subsequent early release in 2025 and return to Europe, before the Milan arrest.
The separate American proceedings are historical context, not a component of the Old Bailey order. They help explain the extended interval between the UK conviction and the sentence now being put into effect. The current UK development concerns the six-year sentence handed down in 2013.
What happens now
The order means Mayer is to serve the custodial term already imposed by the London court. It does not alter the original length of that term, and the available case information does not set out any calculation of time to be served, release date or further court date. Those matters should not be inferred from the length of the sentence alone.
For the financial-crime investigation, the return closes a long-running enforcement stage that began with banking alerts in 2011. For the court, it allows a sentence that had remained unserved after a conviction in absence to be carried out following extradition.
