British Man Gets 10 Years for $97 Million Wine Fraud

A British citizen was sentenced in federal court in Brooklyn on Tuesday to 10 years in prison for helping run a $97 million fine wine investment fraud that prosecutors said deceived more than 140 victims in the United States and abroad.

The defendant, James Wellesley, who also used the names Andrew Fuller and Andrew Templar, was convicted of wire fraud conspiracy after authorities said he posed as an executive at Bordeaux Cellars and used the company to solicit money from investors between June 2017 and February 2019. Prosecutors said Wellesley and a co-conspirator, Stephen Burton, told investors that Bordeaux Cellars arranged loans between wealthy wine collectors and outside lenders, with the loans supposedly secured by valuable wine collections held by the company. Those claims were false, prosecutors said.

United States District Judge Pamela K. Chen imposed the sentence in Brooklyn and ordered Wellesley to forfeit $1 million. A restitution decision will be made later. Burton pleaded guilty in July 2025 to wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy and is awaiting sentencing.

According to prosecutors, the scheme drew investors at conferences in the United States and overseas. The pair promised regular interest payments and said the loans were fully collateralized by wine assets. Instead, prosecutors said, there were no real wine collectors behind the transactions and Bordeaux Cellars did not hold the wine it claimed to control. Money from new investors was used to pay earlier investors, while some funds were diverted for personal use.

Authorities said the operation followed a Ponzi-style structure. Investors received payments that appeared to be interest from June 2017 through December 2018, which encouraged many of them to roll over their money into new loans. Of the more than $97 million raised, only about $14 million was repaid before the scheme collapsed, leaving losses of more than $83 million.

United States Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. said Wellesley “preyed on investors around the globe” by using lies to induce them to invest tens of millions of dollars. James C. Barnacle Jr., assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York office, said Wellesley had “swindled nearly $100 million” by pretending to be an executive broker for fine wine collections and had damaged trust in a prestigious industry.

The case was handled by the Business and Securities Fraud Section of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.