A city banker from Sevenoaks has been jailed for seven years for his part in an elaborate ruse to secure up to £54 million of mortgages on three houses in London.

Matthew Hinds, 36, was vice president at Nomura International Plc, a city bank when he signed off fake documents that said a company owned by Ganendran Subramaniam was worth $1 billion.

Subramaniam, 34, was jailed for 11 years after an 11-week trial for his role in the scheme.

According to Bloomberg.com “Subramaniam, who was unemployed, made a deposit on the purchase of a shell company called Astrobridge Ltd. in 2007, and then worked with Hinds at Nomura to attain mortgages ‘worth tens of millions’ of pounds to buy London properties.”

Hinds then created false documents on his headed paper from his company, Noruma, stating Astrobridge was run by a millionaire commodity trader and had a revenue of $400 million. These claims were then sent to potential lenders.

The owner of Astrobridge Ltd was not aware of the illegal activities, police said.

The fraud was rumbled in 2007 by Noruma after they received a letter from someone who had been sent one of Hinds and Subramaniam’s false bank guarantees. After an internal investigation, Noruma handed the case to police.

Bloomberg says this was not the only attempted swindle by the pair: “Investigators discovered Hinds and Subramaniam also tried to deceive companies in the U.S. using Nomura documents as collateral in an effort to secure large loans, the police said. In one instance, police said, the pair claimed they wanted to invest $127 million in a company’s construction projects, only to disappear after receiving an initial fee of $75,000.”