Details of Neville’s plea, made earlier this year, emerged in the latest accounts of Mallett’s parent company Stanley Gibbons.
Neville is now awaiting sentencing, as is former client Robert A Olins, the disgraced former chief executive of a technology company, who also pleaded guilty to certain charges against him.
The case, described previously in court papers as “a brazen shell game to deceive and hide assets”, involved the underestimating of the value of sales of art and antiques to allow money to be kept rather than handed over to a court-appointed receiver.
According to the prosecutors’ complaint, filed in a Manhattan Federal Court in August 2015, Olins conducted the scheme from July 2011 in coordination with a then-unnamed New York-based employee of Mallett Inc. Neville left Mallett last year followed later by CEO Giles Hutchinson Smith.
Issue not disclosed
Stanley Gibbons reiterated it did not know of the matter when it bought publicly quoted Mallett plc in October 2014. “This issue had not been disclosed to the company by the directors of Mallett during the due diligence process prior to the acquisition.” The investigation is ongoing and Stanley Gibbons anticipate costs of £2m relating to the case.
Stanley Gibbons said that “no criminal or civil charges have been filed against Mallett Inc or any Mallett group company to date” but said it cannot “predict with certainty whether Mallett Inc or any other company or person in the Mallett group will be named in civil or criminal claims or litigation as a result of the investigations”.
