My boss stole £11.5m of people's life savings

There was a grim irony to the flyers that advertised Steven Long’s services. They fear-mongered about the very same kinds of financial disaster he would end up landing his clients in. The charismatic 59-year-old, a self-styled wealth management expert who had a penchant for luxury watches and cars, would mail out leaflets targeting elderly people. He planted fears that if they moved into a nursing home they could be forced to sell their homes to pay for their care. “Making a will is not enough!” declared one flyer. “Find out how YOU can protect your home and savings from care fees, the taxman, and many other threats.” The real threat was Long himself, said Del DelaRonde, an ex-employee who helped bring the fraudster to justice. “Steve was the one they should have been worried about. He was the shark.” Del, a French-Canadian living in Bridgend county, specialises in turning round struggling businesses. The 67-year-old was hired to help save Universal Wealth, an Ipswich-based group of companies run by Long, who claimed its trust funds would help clients safely pass on their assets to loved ones. Now Long is awaiting sentence for a massive fraud in which he stole £11.5m worth of investments from 115 victims. An earlier civil case against him heard customers had lost out to the tune of £25m. As police put it in a recent statement: “Some lost the security they had spent a lifetime building – with money set aside for retirement or essential care simply wiped out.” Following Long’s recent conviction Del invited us to his Cefn Cribwr home and told us the inside story of his time at Universal Wealth. He suspects it is a story which will make a decent crime film some day. The grandfather-of-two spent time working at Universal Wealth from October 2017 until shortly before its collapse in April 2018. The first he heard of the business was from a friend who happened to be its HR director. She mentioned staff were frequently being paid late and that, when she had sought answers from a colleague in the finance department, he had stopped responding to her. Soon afterwards Long, who had heard of Del's expertise through the HR director, invited him to meet at a bar in London Paddington to discuss a potential job. “Steve came down on the train from Ipswich," said Del. "My first impression was that he seemed plausible. He was smartly dressed, quite good-looking and charming, and wearing a Patek Philippe watch worth about £100,000.” Long told him the business was running out of money but was expecting an imminent cash injection. He hired Del as interim chief financial officer (CFO) and tasked him with getting the company “a month’s breathing space”. “He only semi-suggested lay-offs in that meeting,” said Del. “I told him: ‘No, don't lay anyone off until I get the lay of the land.’” Long, who came from a construction background, had been running companies under the Universal Wealth banner since 2008. The group had built up around 3,000 clients who entered into lasting power of attorney agreements – supposedly to protect their retirement plans and elderly care. “The salespeople were desperately trying to hit targets because they would get big bonuses if they did,” said Del. “Nearly all were driving Mercedes leased by the company. Steve had a thing about Mercs and drove a very expensive AMG himself.” The Mercedes cars were part of the affluent image that Long used to impress potential customers. The company would put flyers through doors across the country inviting people to well-polished presentations at hotels. Long would host these 'keep it in the family' seminars, which attracted audiences in the hundreds. Del was unaware the businessman had lied to clients about their money being placed in “ring-fenced, risk-free” trusts. “My understanding was there had been bad investments but not criminality,” he said. His first day offered few good omens. Del arrived at the offices at Dencora House, Ipswich, to find his new boss had ignored his advice on redundancies. Days earlier Long had laid off all but 10 of the 50-strong workforce. “The people remaining were all a bit in shock,” said Del. “I was introduced not as CFO but as something like ‘restructure specialist’.” Staff had not been paid for the previous month and the building’s landlord was chasing unpaid rent. When Universal Wealth was awash with cash Long had taken on 10 self-contained offices in the building. Now the place was eerily quiet. “The salespeople had just been laid off and all the Mercedes they’d been driving – about 17 of them – were lined up in the car park, all behind on their payments,” said Del. The group’s financial records were an indecipherable mess and accounts seemed to have been “guesstimated”, said Del. Universal Wealth was facing a winding-up petition for £410,000 of unpaid tax. Del thought he might be able to salvage the business by claiming a £560,000 tax refund for ‘research and development’ in the form of a costly IT system it had created. “I had no idea just how much of an irreversible mess the company was in,” he said. Long was rarely in the office. When he did turn up, often showing off a new luxury watch, he evaded Del’s questions. At one point he told Del he had invested £10m of the trust’s funds in a US company, which he claimed he could not name due to a confidentiality agreement. Later he would say the true figure was £25m, according to Del. “Steve did say funds had been invested in a skyscraper in Dubai,” said Del. “He even told me he’d travelled to Dubai and stood at the spot where the office block was due to be built. “When the company had been doing well it was bringing in £100,000 a week. Steve had been taking drawings of around £200,000 to £300,000 a year. He had opened a new office in Sheffield, which was a complete disaster. The outgoings became far higher than the money coming in.” It became common for furious clients and family members to turn up at Dencora House questioning why they could not access their investments. “It got so bad that staff would put the blinds down and hide,” said Del. “The clients were not stupid people. They had earned a good living and got taken in by Steve’s plausibility. Often it would be an old couple with a million-pound house. They sign up and the house is transferred into the trust. “Now the trust owns the house and the couple are owed a million pounds. When they die Steve deals with the probates and the house gets sold. In theory the original owners’ children get the money but that doesn’t happen. There were 40 to 50 people in that situation asking: ‘Where's the money?’” Long started blaming stress for his repeated absences from the offices. Bailiffs repossessed nine of the 10 office units. A mountain of equipment was shoved into the cramped space of the one remaining. The updates given by Long were becoming increasingly strange, said Del. “At one point he told me he’d travelled to the US to meet a woman that Universal had invested with. He said they had just sat down at a restaurant in Florida when law enforcement burst in and arrested her.” Del said some staff became so concerned over Long’s obvious lack of a rescue plan that they decided not to tell him about large cheques that had arrived from clients, instead sending them back. Looming over Long was a High Court case brought by 27 families who wanted to know why £25m worth of clients’ money was missing and where it had gone. The judge was demanding the same information. Del and two members of the legal team agreed to meet Long in preparation for his court date. By this point angry creditors were descending on the office so often that they decide to meet at a hotel. At the meeting, in April 2018, Long was still reluctant to give detailed answers about the funds. Del recalls telling him: “Steve, listen to us you bloody idiot. If you don’t provide the information you’ll be going straight to jail from the dock for contempt of court.” Long then, according to Del, admitted one client’s money had been transferred to a bank in Hong Kong, then to a bank in Singapore, and then to an investment company in Florida. “He explained £300,000 had left HSBC in Ipswich and only £275,000 had arrived in Hong Kong. We said to Steve: ‘Flipping hell, that’s an expensive transfer fee.’ And he told us: ‘No, the money has gone to someone else.’ “Only £250,000 got to Singapore, and then only £225,000 got to Florida. So there had been three skimmings. I remember exchanging a look with the two legal people – it was a look of ‘these are our worst fears being confirmed’ – and then we just put our pens and pads away. We told Steve: ‘If we stay here any longer we are going to be party to this.’ So we left him and quit that day. “Steve was pretty forlorn. If he’d gone to court and made that admission he’d have hoisted himself on his own petard so I suspect that's why he didn't disclose it.” Later that year Long was jailed for eight months in the civil case. The High Court judge, Mrs Justice Rose, had found him in contempt of court after he failed to disclose information to help track down the missing £25m. Then came a criminal investigation which took almost eight years but has resulted in Long finding himself behind bars again. He has been remanded in custody since March – when he pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud by abuse of trust spanning from 2008 to 2018 – with a sentence to be passed next month. We have seen lengthy statements given to police by Del as he chose to breach the confidentiality agreement that he signed when he was hired by Long. Del claims to be owed £44,000 in wages from Universal Wealth but he does not regret becoming involved in the business. He would not otherwise have been able to help police with key information, he said. Reflecting on his experience he concluded: “If someone’s a crook they’re a crook. Yes, Steve was registered with STEP (the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners), yes he had a qualified solicitor and accountant with him, but it doesn’t matter. It was a façade and he fooled a lot of people.” The serious economic crime team for eastern England said funds went towards “extravagant personal expenses of Long and those closest to him”. For some victims the losses were in the hundreds of thousands. Detective constable Lisa Hunt said: "Steven Long presented himself as the consummate professional, seemingly backed by accreditation for practitioners in the trust and estate sector. "He targeted victims who placed their full trust in him – many of them elderly, vulnerable, or planning carefully for their families’ futures. Long callously exploited that trust for his own gain leaving victims and their loved ones facing devastating financial and emotional consequences." Del is now running a very different business venture. He is chief executive of a green transport start-up called MotiveXQ , which makes four-wheeled pedal-electric vehicles. If you know about a story we should be investigating you can let our investigations editor know at conor.gogarty@walesonline.co.uk.