London: Three Indian-origin businessmen who swindled banks in Britain and the United States of more than 300 million pounds by pretending to run a worldwide metal trading empire have been found guilty and face a long term in jail.Virendra Rastogi (39), Anand Jain (43) and Gautam Majumdar (57), ex-directors of metal trading business RBG Resources, were convicted at London's Southwark Crown Court of conspiracy to defraud and remanded to custody this week.

Judge James Wadsworth told the three, they could expect 'long prison terms' when he sentences them on June 5 The conviction came at the end of a long drawn out international investigation. When investigators from the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) swooped on Rastogi in his Mayfair apartment London in 2002, he was found shredding wads of documents.

For six years, Rastogi reportedly conned banks into funding non-existent metal trading deals using 324 fake companies that turned out to be based in small flats and shops, with few assets beyond a table and chair. The address of one company turned out to be a cowshed in India and another was a launderette in America. Hundreds of millions of dollars and pounds circulated around the globe on the instruction of the conspirators.

''This was a sophisticated and complex enterprise; it continued for over four years, in increasing amounts and fooled not only the banks (who undertook their own due diligence) but also the auditors,'' the SFO said after they were convicted

Leicester:Asif Patel, a 32-year-old Indian-origin man has been sentenced to five years of imprisonment for his involvement in a massive racket involving trafficking of people from India to the UK.He was a key player in the gang which used forged passports and documents to bring thousands of Indian nationals into the UK. He was found guilty of a conspiracy to facilitate illegal entry into the UK at Leicester Crown Court in January and was sentenced on Wednesday to five-year imprisonment.

The court was told that his role in the scam included handling of the money taken from the clients, which was as high as 8,000 pounds, for their passage into Britain. Patel sent money to contacts in India who recruited the clients, using a money exchange bureau, Bolton news reported. It is not known how many people were brought into the country but gang members made millions of pounds from the lucrative enterprise, it said.

Many clients travelled from India to South Africa using forged documents. Once there, they paid 500 each for a genuine South African passport which was fraudulently issued. The passports were then used to enter Britain because anyone visiting the UK with a South African passport does not need a visa. Those who managed to get into the UK were kept in safe houses in towns with large Gujrati communities such as Bolton, Blackburn, Preston and Leicester. Often they then registered with a college or became involved in sham marriages to extend their stay, the report said.