A cryptocurrency boss has been jailed for more than 11,000 years after swindling investors out of millions of dollars.

Faruk Faith Ozer, founder of Thodex, was sentenced to 11,196 years in prison despite prosecutors request for a 40,562-year sentence.

The Turkish high school dropout was 22 when he started his own business, but on Thursday he was found guilty of money laundering, fraud, and organised crime.

It comes after the 29-year-old fled to Albania in 2021 with investor funds following the collapse of his business.

However, after Interpol issued a red notice for him, Ozer was located after two years on the run.

Faruk Faith Ozer was sentenced to 11,196 years in prison at a Turkish court 

Authorities immediately extradited him back to his home country, where he faced criminal charges.

According to state media, it is believed that Ozer took $2 billion (£1.6 billion) from his customers before he went into hiding in Albania.

But the total amount of damages experienced by investors when Thodex went bankrupt is unknown.

According to the Anadolu agency, Ozer told the court: “I am smart enough to manage all institutions in the world. This is evident from the company I founded at the age of 22. If I were to establish a criminal organisation, I would not act so amateurishly.”

Ozer went into hiding after his business collapsed in 2021 but he was located in Albania two years later 

At an Istanbul court, Ozer, recived the hefty sentence alongside his sister Serap and brother Guven who were also found guilty of the same charges.

This lengthy sentence would be a shock to some people, but in Turkey, it’s quite common.

This legislation became more frequent after Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2004 in the hope of becoming part of the European Union.

In 2022, Adnan Oktar, a cult leader, was sentenced to 8,658 years in prison on several charges, including sexual abuse and depriving someone of their liberty.

Cambridge chip designer Arm will embark on an investor roadshow this week ahead of becoming the most valuable float in New York in two years.

The technology giant plans to ask investors to pay $47 (£37) to $51 per share when it starts to market its IPO and hold meetings with potential investors this week, Reuters reported.

Some big names already signed up as IPO investors in Arm include Apple, Nvidia, Samsung and Google owner Alphabet.

The company was revealed to be targeting a valuation range of $50-55billion in its IPO, although this is below the $64billion quoted by its owner SoftBank in a recent transaction.

This would make Arm the most valuable company to list in New York since the $70billion debut of electric car maker Rivian Automotive in 2021.

Target: The technology giant plans to ask investors to pay $47 (£37) to $51 per share when it starts to market its IPO

SoftBank took Arm private for £24billion in 2016, tearing it away from the London Stock Exchange. SoftBank had hoped to sell Arm to US chip firm Nvidia but a £52billion ($66billion) deal in 2022 collapsed due to regulatory obstacles.

UK ministers then lobbied to SoftBank for a dual listing in London and New York but the City was left empty-handed.

Arm, whose products feature in about 90 per cent of smartphones, has seen an increasing demand for AI chips. The company is gunning for a record float valuation for a UK company when it lists as early as this month.

New York has become popular with tech entrepreneurs. Oxford-based vehicle maker Arrival was given a £10.6billion valuation on the Nasdaq in 2021. 

The world’s largest building materials company CRH also warned it would move its primary stock market listing from London to the US while gambling giant Flutter plans an autumn New York listing.

British life-sciences company Abcam, already listed in New York, was snapped up by US medical giant Danaher in a £4.5billion deal last week.

Daniel Ives, senior equity analyst for Wedbush Securities, said: ‘There are a number of phenomenal technology and life sciences companies in the UK and all are acquisition candidates for bigger US firms.

‘This could be the tip of the iceberg as more UK based tech and life sciences companies get swallowed.’

London’s largest ever float was Glencore’s £38billion valuation in 2011.

The names of UK life sciences pioneers Abcam, Instem and Dechra Pharmaceuticals may not be very familiar.

Yet each of the three listed companies – antibody supplier Abcam, pharma software innovator Instem and veterinary drugs maker Dechra – have been, or are being, swallowed by bigger overseas competitors.

They are precisely the kind of firms, which given a more vibrant and liquid London stock market, potentially could have developed into the next GlaxoSmithKline or Smith & Nephew.

Instead of inventive British firms expanding organically or through bold acquisitions, they have become sitting ducks, easily absorbed by more wealthy foreign predators.

Some of the blame for this rests with flaccid boards of directors who raise the white flag and head off into the sunset, clutching fat cheques for automatically vested share options. The fundamental reasons for the decline in the cult of UK equity run much deeper than that.

Time for reflection?: Britain has an investment community hung up on avoiding risk and in thrall to corporate governance and short-term returns

Share registers have changed dramatically with pension funds and long-term investors barely visible. The spirit of adventure and ambition, which enabled AstraZeneca, Unilever and Diageo to become global leaders in their respective fields, sadly looks to be lost. Instead, Britain has an investment community hung up on avoiding risk and in thrall to corporate governance and short-term returns.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt sought to try and reverse declinist tendencies with the Edinburgh reforms at the end of last year.

Eight months on and little of the £75billion of pension fund cash, which he pledged to unleash for riskier innovative investment, has been unlocked.

Similarly, modernisation of stock market listings, proposed by the London Stock Exchange and broadly supported by City regulator the Financial Conduct Authority, has become mired in controversy because of objections from governance mavens. At the turn of the millennium, some 39 per cent of the UK stock market was owned by UK pension funds. That number that has now shockingly fallen to just 4 per cent.

Blame for this market malfunction can be placed at several doors. Veteran City fund manager Richard Buxton, winding up a long career at Schroders and Jupiter, blames over cautious rules imposed by regulators and auditors who have attempted to make pension fund investment risk free.

Certainly the rule makers made it inevitable that pension funds would become squeamish about risks. The origins of the great pensions switch, from equities to shares, date back to the 1990s. The late Robert Maxwell’s raid on the Mirror Group pension fund led to tougher protections for pensioners but put the brakes on risk-taking.

A key incentive for pension funds investment in equities was eliminated by Gordon Brown in 1997 when he effectively abolished the tax breaks on dividends paid into retirement nest eggs. Together, regulatory and tax changes effectively killed Britain’s ‘gold standard’ defined benefit pensions culture.

Big firms such as Boots, with in surplus schemes, made it fashionable to lock in the gains by switching into bonds. The idea that bonds are a safer place was blown out of the water by the liability-driven investment (LDIs) implosion last year. Pension fund advisers turned risk-free assets into derivatives and threatened outcomes for at least 5m present and future retirees.

Regulators and actuaries who supported the bond revolution need to take responsibility for a potential catastrophe. The switch from equity to bonds had diminished London’s status as a share trading and listing powerhouse. Professional markets for currencies, derivatives and the like, still lead the world. But the consequences of great pension fund retreat for UK plc have been dire.

Cadbury might still be British had retirement money not been displaced by hedge funds. Investment in our public utilities would have been a priority rather than dividends distributed to far flung investors.

And Arm Holdings, Britain’s most valued semi-conductor creator, might never have escaped to New York. Hunt fired the starting gun seeking change. It is time pension funds respond to the challenge.

The Barclays Equity Gilt Study – with data reaching back to 1899 – shows over time shares always outperform gilts and indeed continued to do so through Covid-19 and the Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Aversion to risk has been at a heavy cost to the country.

Nanoco has rejected fresh calls from a minority shareholder to replace its entire board, arguing it would be ‘damaging and disruptive to the business’.

The shareholder group, led by Tariq Hamoodi, who holds a stake of around 5 per cent Nanoco, has called for a general meeting to vote on the removal of bosses including chief executive Brian Tenner and finance chief Liam Gray.

Also in the firing line is the group’s chief technology officer, who co-founded the company and invented its quantum dot scale-up tech. 

The investor group is unhappy about Nanoco’s settlement with Samsung earlier this year, which it claims was ‘on terms substantially less favourable than its prior statements had led shareholders to believe’.

The investors’ group is unhappy about Nanoco’s settlement with Samsung earlier this year

Nanoco filed a lawsuit in February 2020 for patent infringement, alleging the South Korean tech giant used its ‘quantum dot’ technology in its TVs without permission.

The pair were due to go to court in Texas but agreed to settle. Samsung last month agreed to pay £123million to Manchester-based Nanoco – far below industry estimates of around £215million.

Hamoodi and the investors group, which had already sent two letters earlier this year, want the entire board of Nanoco to be replaced by new directors.

Nanoco said it was in the process of reviewing ‘the content and validity’ of the requests and would make an announcement regarding a possible general meeting ‘in due course’. 

However, it reiterated that the proposed board changes were not in the interests of the company or its shareholders. 

Christopher Richards, non-executive chairman of Nanoco, said: ‘We continue to emphatically reject Mr Hamoodi’s proposals to change the entirety of the board at such a key point in Nanoco’s evolution. 

‘The Board welcomes scrutiny but his selective interpretation of the past, significant factual errors, and speculative concerns take a number of events out of context to create a misleading narrative.

‘Mr Hamoodi’s proposals would be damaging and disruptive to Nanoco’s future prospects and likely result in an exodus of key talent from the business.’

Nanoco shares were down 3.5 per cent to 18.4p in morning trading on Wednesday.

They have lost almost 60 per cent of their value since the start of the year and are down by around 47 per cent compared to 12 months ago. 

Crispin Odey’s beleaguered asset management firm has suspended two more funds to prevent investors from fleeing.

Odey Asset Management has blocked withdrawals from its flagship Odey European Inc fund after it received requests to return 19 per cent of its value.

It also suspended its OEI Mac Inc fund after investors tried to withdraw 35 per cent of its value. 

Combined, the two funds managed assets worth around £1.2billion.

Odey, who was ousted from his own firm this month amid a string of sexual harassment allegations which he denies, managed both of the funds prior to his exit from the business. 

Accused: Crispin Odey was ousted from his own firm this month amid a string of sexual harassment allegations which he denies

In a letter to clients regarding the European Inc fund, the firm said allowing withdrawals would ‘not be in the best interests of the fund and its shareholders as a whole’, Bloomberg reported.

The asset manager is considering restructuring some operations to allow clients to transfer their money into a new fund.

The group has been in crisis since the Financial Times published allegations of sexual misconduct against Odey by 13 women, sparking a rush of withdrawal requests from clients while several City institutions began to cut ties. 

The company has said it was ‘considering several options’ for its future as the allegations took a ‘serious’ toll.

The group has also said it was in ‘advanced discussions’ to break itself up and transfer funds and staff to rivals in what could spell the end of the firm.

The debacle is a catastrophe for Odey, one of the UK’s most prominent financiers who set up the firm in 1991 and gained a reputation for profiting from risky bets including against the pound during the Brexit vote.

The 64-year-old has lost his status as a ‘fit and proper’ individual in the City of London, days after being ousted from the hedge fund in a symbolic blow.

Pushed out: Crispin Odey founded Odey Asset Management in 1991

Bosses at the hedge fund set up by Crispin Odey have spent the weekend trying to calm investors after its founder was ousted over sexual assault allegations.

Odey was pushed out by partners on Saturday after an explosive report alleged he sexually harassed or assaulted 13 women over 25 years.

Peter Martin, chief executive of Odey Asset Management, and Michael Ede, chief financial officer, said in a statement: ‘Crispin Odey is leaving the partnership. As from today, he will no longer have any economic or personal involvement in the partnership.’

The hedge fund said it took the allegations of misconduct, first reported by the Financial Times, ‘extremely seriously’.

Partners at Odey Asset Management were drafting a letter to investors over the weekend – hoping to restore confidence in the business.

On Monday, the group also insisted its funds were not restricting investor withdrawals in response to weekend reports.

A spokesman for the group said: ‘All funds are open today as per usual business and we’re not considering gating any funds.

‘The only fund we’re considering closing is the Odey Swan Fund, the Ucits fund formerly run by Crispin Odey.’

Odey, who founded the firm in 1991, denies the claims against him, stating that they were ‘rubbish’.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday on Friday night before stepping down, Odey said that he was the ‘victim’ of an ‘aggressive campaign’.

But the allegations have pitched the company into crisis, with one industry source predicting ‘it’s all over’ for the firm: ‘It will never recover from this and the partners will just run their own personal money under a different name.’

Some of the world’s biggest banks had already started distancing themselves from the fund last week.

JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are reviewing their relationship as prime brokers, entities that provide hedge funds with credit. And Schroders has sold its last remaining investments.

French brokerage Exane, part of BNP Paribas, was said to have cut ties with the fund while Morgan Stanley has also severed links.

Reports last week said the City watchdog was still probing Odey Asset Management and had widened its investigation in light of the new claims.

Odey has been at the helm of the hedge fund more than three decades. At its peak the firm managed more than £10billion worth of investments.

A Brexiteer, Odey says he made £220m in 2016 betting against the pound as the UK voted to leave the EU. He started donating regularly to the Conservative Party in 2007 and his donations to date total more than £350,000.

Pub stocks rallied as brokers across the City raised a glass to improved trading in the sector.

As fears of a consumer slowdown this year swept through the industry, HSBC told its clients that its concerns have been ‘defied’ by encouraging demand and a positive sales outlook among bars and restaurants.

‘We had grown increasingly nervous on the consumer outlook and the risk of earnings downgrades, but these have not shown through,’ the broker said.

‘In short, the sector looks well set to grow profits and further earnings upgrades could occur.’

HSBC upgraded its ratings on Wetherspoons and Mitchells and Butlers from ‘hold’ to ‘buy’ 

As a result HSBC upgraded its rating on Wetherspoons from ‘hold’ to ‘buy’ and nearly doubled the target price to 940p.

Mitchells and Butlers was also lifted from ‘hold’ to ‘buy’ while its target price increased from 185p to 300p.

Pubs have been affected by rising costs and falling consumer spending. Wetherspoons boss Tim Martin earlier this month said: ‘Inflation remains a more intractable issue’

But with energy prices falling and food inflation becoming more stable, analysts hope pub operators will be in a better position.

Wetherspoons was up 3.2 per cent, or 23p, to 733.5p, and Mitchells & Butlers added 1.4 per cent, or 2.8p, to 204.6p. The FTSE 100 fell 1 per cent, or 75.93 points, to 7446.14 and the FTSE 250 was down 0.5 per cent, or 84.47 points, to 18722.90.

In the latest FTSE reshuffle, Ocado escaped demotion from the blue-chip index. There was a promotion for IMI, the engineering group, which will enter the top tier in place of the commercial property giant British Land.

Asos, Capricorn Energy and Tullow Oil were among those heading out of the FTSE 250.

Stephen Harris, the boss of Bodycote will retire next year after more than a decade at the helm. He took over as chief executive of the heat treatment specialist back in 2009.

The news came as revenue rose 22 per cent to £281million in the first four months of the year. Bodycote shares fell 1.6 per cent, or 10.5p, to 638.5p.

WH Smith enjoyed a positive session as the retailer cashed in on the ongoing rebound in travel ahead of the peak summer trading period.

The company, which owns more than 500 stores across airports, hospitals, railway stations and motorway service areas across the UK, said that its travel revenue in the 13 weeks to May 27 was up 31 per cent compared to the same period a year ago.

Peel Hunt analysts said that the ‘most pleasing element’ of the group’s performance was arguably the 130 new stores that it is hoping to open. Shares rose 2.8 per cent, or 42p, to 1570p.

The race to snap up Purplebricks looked set reach a conclusion after a major shareholder, which last week made an eleventh-hour swoop on the online estate agent, withdrew its bid.

Lecram Holdings, which owns nearly 5.2 per cent of Purplebricks and is run by activist investor Adam Smith, had tabled a bid of 0.5p a share in cash, valuing Purplebricks at about £1.5million.

But it has decided to walk away on the basis that ‘the financial condition of Purplebricks was found to be significantly worse than expected’.

Now, the only deal that is now left on the table is a sale for a token price of £1 to rival Strike.

The online estate agent’s shareholders will vote on whether to back the offer in a general meeting on Friday.

Yesterday, the shares fell 27 per cent, or 0.17p, to 0.46p.