Walter Finch
THE alleged mastermind behind one of Spain’s biggest investment frauds has insisted he’s innocent.
Darren Kirby, who founded Continental Wealth Management (CWM), told the Olive Press in an exclusive interview he left Spain with ‘just €50’ in his pocket when it collapsed in 2017.
The 60-year-old confirmed on the record that the infamous ‘offshore investment company’, set up on the Costa Blanca, had lost ‘around €35 million’.
But he denied it was due to deliberate fraud, and instead pinned the blame on a series of ‘bad investments’.
It left hundreds of mostly elderly British expats destitute on discovering that the value of their pension portfolios had collapsed under CWM’s management.
Having fled Spain, first for Australia and then Cambodia, he is now back living in the London area.
He told Olive Press this week he was ‘aware’ of various lawsuits against his former firm and that his ex-partner Jody Smart, 48, had just been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for a series of frauds directly connected to CWM.
The judge in the case, Francisco Javier Guirau, stated that Smart had ‘profited handsomely’ from the activities of CWM, which was ‘controlled by Kirby and ex-finance director Alan Gorringe.’
However, Kirby insisted he was innocent of any wrongdoing, having ‘taken a step back’ and handed over the running of the company to Smart and Gorringe in 2015 (Gorringe died in 2019).
He went on to say that despite the enormous losses, ‘there was no fraud committed by CWM’.
The former financial advisor also claimed he had made ‘no money’ from the offshore investment scheme that he set up in Alicante in 2010, instead claiming to be a victim himself.
In a bombshell phone call from the UK, he slammed his ex-partner Jody, now Jody Pearson, as a ‘wanton pariah’ who had ‘stolen everything from me’.
“She took everything,” the former financial advisor said. “She even took my Savile Row suit and a sculpture of my baby daughter when she was just six months old,” he claimed.
Kirby also insisted he ‘transferred everything’ into Jody’s name on the advice of lawyers because ‘she was younger than me’.
She was left with ‘all the assets, totally, completely,’ he claimed.
This even included the Costa Blanca villa that Kirby had been ‘planning to retire in’.
“Everyone says I ran away – I didn’t run away,” he insisted this week, speaking publicly for the first time.
“But as soon as I left, Jody stripped all my assets, the cars – and a whole lot more.”
The Olive Press will be revealing more of Kirby’s sensational claims about the CWM scandal over the coming weeks.
