Tomas Wilmot and his two sons Kevin and Christopher were jailed at Southwark Crown Court after an investigation into a £14m deception that involved 16 crime fighting bodies working across 10 national jurisdictions.
Tomas Wilmot, 64, the ringleader of the operation, was jailed for nine years. His sons were given sentences of five years each. The sentencing took place on Monday, hours after they were found guilty of the multi-million pound scam.
Honour Judge Leonard QC, sentencing, said: "You ran a highly successful enterprise. You deprived many individual investors of substantial amounts of money; for some that was money they could not afford to give up. It was a staggering amount of £14m.
"You've sailed so close to the wind in your commercial enterprises it was not a surprise the FSA investigated you."
The court heard that the Wilmots operated an international operation involving 16 different boiler rooms selling shares to 1,700 victims in the UK. Although the operation was controlled from the UK, many of the boiler rooms, the offices that called potential investors and pressurised them into buying bogus shares, were based in Spain. The scam ran for nearly five years before it was brought to the attention of the FSA and then the City of London Police in 2008.
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