The tale of the half-billion-pound sting The Victorian MP Jabez Balfour was a fraudster on a scale that makes Robert Maxwell look like a petty thief, says Andrew Roberts

From: The Sunday Telegraph London | Date: March 7, 2004| Author: | Copyright information

Jabez: The Rise

and Fall of a

Victorian Rogue

by David McKie

Atlantic, pounds 12.99, 284 pp

pounds 11.99 ( pounds 2.25 p&p) 0870 155 7222

JABEZ SPENCER BALFOUR JP, MP was perhaps the greatest financial fraudster in British history, an embezzler on a Melmottian scale dwarfing the far lesser con-tricks of Trebitsch Lincoln, Horatio Bottomley, Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Archer combined. When he stepped on board a steamer bound for Buenos Aires in December 1892, skipping the country moments before the police caught up with him, he left a chain of businesses with combined debts of pounds 7m, the ...

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