The boss of a luxury gem retailer told staff to pretend to be customers to trick investors in the UK’s biggest diamond scam before he vanished without a trace, it has been reported.
Vashi Dominguez allegedly used the deception to prop up his business which collapsed in 2023 with £170million worth of debts.
A number of high-profile names, including John Caudwell – the billionaire founder of Phones4u – had invested hundreds of thousands of pounds into the doomed retailer.
Those backers lost everything when the chain’s promised £157million stock of diamonds turned out to be worth only £100,000.
Dominquez then disappeared, but he has so far avoided being investigated by the Metropolitan Police and the Serious Fraud Squad.
The businessman built his empire by offering a different kind of jewellery experience for the rich.
His bespoke stores gave customers the chance to get ‘hands-on’ and create their own rings from a hand-selected array of dazzling diamonds.
And when Dominquez appeared on ITV’s This Morning in 2014, he fitted a £500,000 string of sparklers around Holly Willoughby’s neck.
Dominguez previously told the Mail: ‘Here at VASHI, we’re seeing more couples than ever creating their rings together.
‘I would say as many as one in three purchases are now couples shopping together – a number that’s doubled in the last three years.
‘And that’s being led by more and more women wanting to be involved in the whole process.’
And in 2021, when business appeared to be booming, Vashi opened a new flagship store on a prime site in Covent Garden, central London.
However, former shop staff and investors have revealed that all was not quite as it seemed.
Charlotte Paul, a former data analyst for Vashi, told BBC Panorama: ‘After the shininess had worn off, we were getting, like, two, three, four people in it a day, and that was the reality in one of the busiest squares in London.’
To encourage further investments, Vashi is understood to have told staff to ‘look busy’ and pretend to be paying customers.
Will Hayward, a former store manager explained: ‘It was a whole elaborate show that Vashi would do with the clients, to show that they’ve got so many orders and this is how busy we are – this is why you should really be investing in Vashi.
‘Total facade.’
Moreover, according to the BBC’s report, customers were also being conned by Vashi.
It has been alleged by Lezlie Bailey, a gemologist at Vashi, that the company was buying smaller or lower quality diamonds than what customers were paying for.
Furthermore, the figures that were being published on government website Companies House and that were being sent to investors were fabricated.
In 2021, the documents showed that Vashi had made sales of more than £100m.
But in reality the takings were reportedly only £5million – just 5 per cent of the published figures.
Then just two years later, in April 2023, the luxury diamond company finally went bust.
At first, the investors which included Clive Schlee – the former boss of the sandwich chain Pret a Manger – thought their money was not at risk.
This was because they had been sent valuations, signed off by a real accountant just two months prior, that showed the business’s huge stock of gems was worth £157million.
However according to the BBC’s Panorama, this was just another ploy – with the accountant telling the broadcaster he did not know where the money was.
Rajnikant Patel, who works in a small office in Ilford, east London, said he was ‘very sorry’ about what happened, but said it was ‘nothing to do with us’.
He added that he was not aware the numbers in the accounts were incorrect and that he would not have signed them off if he had known.
It is understood that Dominquez got on a plane to Dubai the day it emerged his company owed creditors £170million.
Due to his disappearance, the BBC has been unable to put its allegations to him.
Meanwhile, the Met Police has said it has not received ‘any referrals from the liquidator or the Insolvency Service’.
The Serious Fraud Office(SFO) has also not launched an investigation saying it only ‘takes on a small number of ‘high-level economic crime cases’ each year.
One of the people who invested heavily in his company told the Mail that it ‘would be entirely appropriate for him to be investigated by the SFO’.