By Tristan Kirk

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A decade ago Anthony Constantinou appeared to be the epitome of a Square Mile success story — sitting atop a burgeoning business empire, rubbing shoulders with royalty and striking deals with Premier League champions. His City of London firm had risen rapidly to prominence, making a fortune in a short space of time. This was thanks in no small part to Constantinou’s bullish boasts of high-flying connections and offers of bountiful rewards from low-risk investments. But in reality, his house was built on a web of lies, and when the crash came it was swift and brutal.

Constantinou’s bullying behaviour and predatory abuse of women was revealed, as it emerged he oversaw an office environment likened to the debauchery of Hollywood film The Wolf of Wall Street. Police raided his business empire and discovered that Constantinou was the architect of a £70 million fraud on his clients. Now he is on the run and at the centre of a worldwide manhunt, attempting to evade a 28-year prison sentence in the UK.

It is the latest chapter of an extraordinary life marked by extremes: untold wealth and luxury, prison and even murder. So what is the true story of a man who shelled out £2.5million for his wedding to wife Penny on the Greek island of Santorini, and spent £70,000 on his son’s first birthday party, while also amassing a collection of high-end vehicles including a Porsche and a Range Rover?

January 2015 marked the high tide of Constantinou’s rise through the ranks of British society — the son of an immigrant who was the head of his own City of London foreign exchange trading company. The firm, Capital World Markets (CWM), had offices at the top of Heron Tower skyscraper in Bishopsgate, and business appeared to be booming. Constantinou was pictured meeting Princess Anne at the London Boat Show, an event his company was sponsoring. And then CWM was announced as an official forex trading partner with Chelsea FC, with a club executive hailing the company’s “transparency and integrity”.

But just two months later, the Chelsea deal was axed as scandal engulfed CWM. Business partners and associates scrambled to distance themselves from Constantinou, as he found himself at the centre of two criminal investigations.

City of London Police officers raided the CWM offices while unravelling a massive fraud at the heart of Constantinou’s business network. And women came forward to lift the lid on his appalling boardroom behaviour.

Constantinou was only three when his father, Aristos Constantinou, was gunned down at his mansion on London’s so-called “Billionaires’ Row”, The Bishops Avenue in Hampstead. The 1985 shooting was dubbed the “silver bullets murder” thanks to the ammunition used for the killing, and happened as Aristos returned home from a New Year’s party with his wife, Elena.

Aristos was the son of a Greek-Cypriot tailor and arrived in England in the early 1960s, just in time for the boom in fashion design. He gained an education at London Fashion School, secured a back room in Carnaby Street to work from, and set about building the wildly successful Ariella fashion brand alongside his brother Achilleas.

The brothers gained a grounding in the industry from their father and then rode the wave of the British fashion revolution — while placing their business at the centre of society with cocktail parties and events. The workshop in Carnaby Street became a fully fledged business off Oxford Street, as Ariella supplied top retailers including Jane Norman, DH Evans and John Lewis. By the mid-1970s, the company had headquarters in Marylebone and retail shops around the world.

On the night of the fatal shooting, Aristos and Elena had returned home late to their mansion. Aristos was killed by six polished nickel-jacketed bullets fired at close range, including one into each temple. The murder, in an affluent part of London, made front-page news around the world, and has never been solved. It did, however, tear the Constantinou family apart.

Elena’s first account was that they had disturbed a burglary when arriving home, and she was grabbed by one of the masked intruders who detained her in the upstairs bathroom. She said she was able to climb out of a window and down a drainpipe to raise the alarm, but by that time her husband was already dead.

However, she later changed her story, saying the shooting was the work of the father of her extra-marital lover.

The year after the shooting she remarried, leaving the country with her three children to start a new life in Cyprus.

The mystery rumbled on for years, with Aristos’s family engaging the services of Keir Starmer, then a leading human rights lawyer, to gain access to the investigation files.

In 2012, Aristos’s brother, Achilleas, accused Elena of involvement in the shooting, calling for her to be arrested and charged.

She refused to agree to return to the UK for questioning but has always denied any involvement in her husband’s death, and the police action never came. To date, no one has ever faced criminal charges over the shooting.

When, in 2015, Achilleas launched a new phase of the Ariella brand, he was asked to comment on nephew Anthony’s legal troubles. “Anthony is the youngest of my brother’s three sons and we had not seen him or his brothers for the last 23 years,” he said at the time, before adding: “When he came to London and visited us a few years ago we welcomed him to our family with open arms and it gave me particularly a lot of closure. He is very much his own man and we have nothing whatsoever to do with each other in business. We wish him well.”

Anthony had barely started his life when he lost his father. He went on to carve out a path in business which echoed his father’s entrepreneurial spirit, starting up a series of companies before the foundation of CWM in late 2013. As a trial at Southwark crown court would hear, his success was built on rampant deceit.

In 2014, police officers in the City of London began to quietly investigate Constantinou’s activities after a series of whistleblowers came forward, alleging not only financial malpractice but also sexual misconduct.

He was charged the following year with six counts of sexual assault against three women, and having pleaded not guilty, a trial at the Old Bailey followed in January 2016. The jury heard in detail how Constantinou insisted on weekly drunken parties at the CWM offices, with staff and associates feeling obliged to join in. In one incident, Constantinou plied a woman with vodka to celebrate making £1 million profit on the trading floor before forcibly kissing her in the toilets.

It happened shortly after Constantinou himself had got married. Another woman revealed how she was force-fed wasabi by Constantinou during a volatile boardroom meeting, before he pinned her against a wall and kissed her “like a piece of meat”. He boasted, “You can’t say no to a Greek man”, she told the court, and she likened his behaviour to Leonardo DiCaprio’s trader character in The Wolf of Wall Street.

A jury convicted him of two sexual assaults, cleared him of a third, and prosecutors decided to abandon three further charges which the jury could not agree on. Judge Nicholas Cooke QC branded Constantinou a “sexual bully”, and rejected the tycoon’s plea for a suspended prison term. “He showed precious little humanity to these two young women,” said the judge, imposing a 12-month jail sentence.

The trial also heard evidence of Constantinou’s penchant for firing people who made minor mistakes that angered him, as well as lurid comments he would aim at women while boasting: “I can say whatever the f*** I like.” More legal troubles were lurking over the horizon. He was freed from prison after serving half the sentence, and ordered to sign the sex offenders’ register for 10 years.

When the CWM offices had been raided by police in 2015, the company issued a bullish statement claiming it was the “victim of an orchestrated campaign initiated by individuals motivated by personal animosity”.

Thirteen people had been arrested when the police probe first sprang into action, but it was Constantinou alone who, in 2020, was charged with running a Ponzi scheme. The subsequent trial in 2023 revealed how victims were lured into handing over tens of thousands of pounds to CWM with the promise of risk-free investments and enticing profits.

They had been told they would receive remarkable returns of five per cent a month, or 60 per cent a year, way beyond anything available through mainstream financial companies.

They typically had to make a minimum commitment of £50,000, although this later rose to £100,000. But the money was not invested in foreign exchange trading. Some was used to pay the early investors and keep them on board, the rest spent on funding Constantinou’s lavish lifestyle — a classic Ponzi scheme.

To help maintain the façade, the company had respectable business deals with Chelsea FC, Wigan Warriors rugby league club, boxing tournaments and the Honda MotoGP team, Constantinou boasted of his vast array of high-flying contacts, and he had been photographed socialising with Princess Beatrice. He spent six-figure sums on private jets and yacht cruises, while shelling out £800,000 for renting the Heron Tower offices and around £100,000 a month on his rented Hampstead home.

Constantinou appeared in the dock for the start of his trial, but by the time the jury convicted him of seven counts of fraud by false representation, fraudulent trading and money laundering, he had disappeared. In his absence, he was sentenced in June 2023 to 14 years in prison. More than 300 people were duped by Constantinou’s Ponzi scheme, and the detectives who investigated are pulling strings to try to recover the lost money.

Constantinou was detained in Bulgaria, briefly, in 2023, as he tried to enter Turkey with a false Spanish passport. But he was let go before the UK authorities could be informed and swoop in to arrest him. Rumours emerged last summer that the fugitive businessman had died of a heart attack while on the run in Guadalajara, Mexico.

But there were significant doubts over the authenticity of the death certificate, and investigators have continued to hunt. Police forces around the world have been authorised to detain Constantinou, while City of London Police has obtained an Interpol “Silver Notice”, which means its officers can seize his global assets.

Not only does the 14-year prison sentence for fraud await Constantinou, but he defaulted on a court order to repay £64 million of stolen money as proceeds of crime. This led a judge to impose a further 14-year jail term.

It means that Constantinou’s sources of wealth are being gradually withdrawn and restricted, while he faces 28 years behind bars — if he can be caught, that is. Police have promised to continue their dogged pursuit of Constantinou, in a bid to claw back the victims’ money.

The only question remaining is whether the final chapter of Constantinou’s extraordinary story is capture and many years behind bars, or being hunted for the remainder of his days.