A Lamborghini Aventador, thirteen watches, a Portland Place mansion and the 18th Duke of Ahlbeck. Five men who gave themselves titles, and the court figures that outlived every one of the titles.
A borrowed title costs nothing, takes a second to deploy and is almost never checked at the first meeting. That is its entire commercial value, and it is why British courts keep sentencing men who awarded themselves one. Real money is quieter and duller than any of this, moving through holding companies and sealed court files.
The rule for this ranking is a criminal conviction or a court order reported by a named source: the Serious Fraud Office, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Insolvency Service, the BBC, Property Week. The order runs by the sum a court or prosecutor attached to the fraud, never by anyone’s wealth, because no verified net worth exists for any of these men and none is invented here. Where a figure rests on a single outlet, that outlet is named in the line. Not one of the five held a peerage.
1. Achilleas Kallakis: £760m, Britain’s largest mortgage fraud, started by selling manorial titles to Americans
He was born Stefan Michalis Kollakis in Ealing on 3 September 1968, and his first fraud conviction, in the early 1990s, was for selling bogus manorial titles to Americans with a conspirator named Martin Lewis, the Guardian reported. Both men then changed their names: Kollakis became Achilleas Kallakis, Lewis became Alexander Martin Williams. The second act was considerably larger. With a slight alteration to his name, a suggestion that he was related to an oil and property tycoon and the help of a corrupt lawyer, Kallakis induced banks to lend against offices carrying inflated valuations. The Serious Fraud Office prosecuted both men successfully in January 2013 and put the fraud at over £760 million, the largest mortgage fraud in UK history. The titles were the apprenticeship.
2. Anthony Williams, ‘Lord Williams of Tomintoul’: £5m embezzled from the Metropolitan Police
Williams was an accountant employed as a finance officer at the Metropolitan Police, which explains both the access and the length of the sentence. According to the BBC, he embezzled over £5 million, spent it on property in the Scottish village of Tomintoul and bought himself the title Baron of Chirnside, styling himself Lord Williams of Tomintoul and becoming known locally as the Laird. He was sentenced to seven and a half years in 1995. The arithmetic of it has a certain purity: the police force paid for the barony, and the police force took it back. Chirnside and Tomintoul are feudal and souvenir titles rather than peerages, which is the detail nobody in the village needed to check, because a man who buys a village tends to be believed about everything else.
3. ‘Lord’ Edward Davenport: a £4m advance-fee fraud and £13.5m repaid under the Proceeds of Crime Act
Edward Ormus Sharrington Davenport, born in Kensington on 11 July 1966 and known as Fast Eddie, came to notice in the late 1980s running the Gatecrasher Balls for wealthy teenagers. He was convicted of tax offences in 1990, became a property developer, and between 2005 and 2009 was the ringmaster of advance-fee schemes that took millions from dozens of people. He was jailed for more than seven years in 2011 at Southwark Crown Court, where prosecuting counsel Simon Mayo QC described the operation behind the letterhead on 5 October 2011: “To outward appearances it was long-established, wealthy and prestigious… It operated from expensive London premises and had a balance sheet showing significant assets… That image, however, deliberately cultivated by these defendants, was entirely false. It was essentially worthless. Its only business was fraud.”
Judge Peter Testar said Davenport had “caused harm to many people”. The court ordered £12m under the Proceeds of Crime Act and a further £1.9m in compensation, and the Serious Fraud Office announced on 22 May 2015 that £13.5m had been paid after a four-year legal battle, the alternative being another ten years inside. The Daily Mail reported that there were at least 51 victims, among them Princess Diana’s wedding dress designer Elizabeth Emanuel, that one victim paid £285,000 to arrange a loan of more than £150 million that never arrived, and that Davenport’s £30 million mansion at 33 Portland Place was sold to meet £14 million of legal bills. A borrowed title and a very real address.
4. Jonathan Allard: a £3.7m Zurich Private Capital scam, a Lamborghini Aventador and 13 watches
Allard, 39, of Wandsworth, ran Zurich Private Capital from premises in Canary Wharf with an official-looking website and a name that did most of the work before he opened his mouth. Between 2013 and 2017, 43 victims were offered returns of nine to twelve per cent on commodities including oil and soya beans. The Crown Prosecution Service confirmed that he pleaded guilty to one count of fraud on 14 April 2023 and was sentenced to seven years and two months on 22 May 2023 at Southwark Crown Court for his key role in a fake £3.7 million investment scam that stole from more than 40 people. He called himself ‘Lord’ Allard and lived accordingly: on his arrest, officers seized a Lamborghini Aventador, 13 luxury watches and jewellery worth about £340,000, according to London News Online. The Metropolitan Police said afterwards that he had masterminded a sophisticated and convincing fraud aimed at vulnerable victims on a large scale. Nobody at Canary Wharf asked which Lordship.
5. Darren Anderson, the ’18th Duke of Ahlbeck’: four years at Nottingham Crown Court, September 2026
Anderson, 43, of Gamston in Nottinghamshire, traded as Lord Timothy Ahlbeck and the 18th Duke of Ahlbeck, and also claimed to be a doctor. He was a director of five companies while banned and told people he ran travel agencies, estate agents and hairdressers. “Darren Anderson was a doctor only in his own mind,” said David Snasdell, chief investigator at the Insolvency Service, in the statement confirming losses of more than £200,000 across 13 companies in 2022 and 2023. He was jailed for four years on Thursday 24 September 2026 at Nottingham Crown Court, disqualified as a director again for 15 years, sentenced on one count of theft brought by Derbyshire Police and had a 2021 suspended sentence activated. The court heard he had used aliases for 15 years and had seven previous convictions for 41 dishonesty offences since 2002; ITV News reported that he had already been jailed for fraud and banned for the maximum 15 years in 2011, then under the name Miles Prestland-Windsor. Derbyshire Police said officers found the items taken from a rented property furnishing his new home when they arrested him.
What the title itself is worth once charges are drafted
None of these five was convicted of calling himself a lord. Styling yourself Lord Timothy Ahlbeck or Baron of Chirnside is not an offence in its own right, and the charge sheets say fraud, theft and embezzlement instead. The title works earlier, in the first meeting, before anyone reads a valuation or a balance sheet, which is precisely why prosecutors keep describing it as a prop rather than a crime. Where identity rather than rank is the lie, the law reaches it more directly: The Register reported in 2005 that a man who had lived 23 years as Christopher Edward Buckingham, the self-styled Earl of Buckingham, marrying and fathering two children under the name, was jailed for 21 months for passport fraud after the Passport Agency established the name belonged to an infant who died at eight months in 1963. In Anderson’s case, the Insolvency Service says it is seeking to confiscate the funds he obtained, and no final sum has been settled. Kallakis began by selling manorial titles to Americans. The Serious Fraud Office put the end of that career at over £760 million.
Cover photograph: Zafer via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
