'Concrete cancer' developer admits to £1.2m property fraud

'Concrete cancer' developer admits to £1.2m property fraud




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A businessman from Swansea has been warned ‘to prepare himself for a custodial sentence’ after admitting to a £1.2 million property fraud, a judge has stated.

Nigel Shreeve, 52, is perhaps best known for being part of a team who created a new technique in the early 2000s to combat ‘concrete cancer’, a condition affecting concrete buildings which have metal reinforcements.

He admitted committing three offences of fraud by false representation and pleaded guilty to more than two dozen charges of transferring criminal property when he appeared at Swansea Crown Court.

The transferring criminal property charges allegedly took place between October 2009 and February last year. Mr Shreeve also pleaded guilty to removing criminal property from the United Kingdom and transferring the money he made to dozens of bank accounts, reported the South Wales Evening Post.

The offences related to a building he owned in the Kingsway in Swansea city centre and to the Swansea Probation Service, Swansea College and the Swansea Chinese Co-operative Society.

He falsely increased the value of the property before it reached the market, by altering the leases of the tenants in the building to make it appear more expensive.

The £1.2 million which was fetched from the sale was then split between more than two dozen bank accounts, which included some outside the UK.

Mr Shreeve, of Neath Road, Hafod, previously owned Swansea centre’s Dolphin Hotel, and had big plans to extend and refurbish the hotel in 2008 – creating suites styled after some of the area’s most famous celebrities including Bonnie Tyler, Catherine Zeta Jones and Enzo Maccarinelli. The plans never came to fruition and the hotel has since shut down.

Sentencing, which has been adjourned pending the preparation of a background report, is set to take place early next year.

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