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The alleged ringleader of one of the most prolific money-laundering syndicates in Britain’s history took a 10 percent cut of the tens of millions of pounds in illicit banknotes that moved through his gold bullion firm in London, a U.K. court heard Friday.

James Stunt, a 40-year-old businessman and ex-husband of Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone’s daughter, Petra Ecclestone, is among eight suspects now standing trial in Yorkshire, England, for their alleged roles in a money laundering scheme tied to Fowler Oldfield, a now-defunct wholesale jeweler based in Northern England.

Leeds Crown Court heard that from January 2014 to September 2016, couriers brought hundreds of millions of pounds of illicit cash—including £28 million from Stunt & Co Ltd, Stunt’s gold dealership in the upscale London district of Mayfair —to Fowler Oldfield, a dealership that operated out of a two-story warehouse in an industrial area of Bradford.

Couriers and employees of Stunt & Co and Fowler Oldfield then deposited the money into the latter company’s account at NatWest “to hide its true origins and give it a veneer of respectability,” prosecutor Nicholas Clarke QC told jurors.

Clarke said Friday that Stunt & Co Ltd handled and moved nearly £3 million of illicit cash to Fowler Oldfield from February to July 2016 for deposit into the latter company’s accounts at NatWest. Fowler then paid £300,000 of that amount into James Stunt’s personal bank account.

Investigators found no records of the companies or individuals who made the initial cash drops in London.

“The picture emerges of large sums of cash collected at Stunt & Co and credited to Fowler Oldfield’s account a day later, and then James Stunt receiving a substantial proportion into his personal account,” Clarke told the jury, adding that the cash was not declared for tax purposes nor “evidentially linked to any legitimate commercial activity.”

All told, an estimated £266 million flowed through Fowler Oldfield’s account at NatWest during the two years and nine months covered by the indictment.

The suspects allegedly used more than £200 million of that total to pay Birmingham-based suppliers for gold bullion that they then shipped to Dubai. They transferred another £46 million to an account held by Stunt & Co, which used the funds to buy gold that was then melted down into “untraceable” grains and shipped to the Emirates.

Prosecutors speculated that Stunt may have entered into business with Fowler Oldfield in August 2015 because his marriage to Petra had entered a rough patch and the “river of money from the Eccleston sources” was running dry.

The couple divorced in 2017.

Stunt, who lived in the U.S. for large portions of the indictment period, told investigators he had no knowledge of how much cash Stunt & Co handled and had largely removed himself from the company’s day-to-day operations.

But telephone records show that Stunt made several phone calls a day to the co-accused, according to prosecutors, who alleged that he wanted regular updates on the laundering scheme and to chase his share of the commission for the transactions Stunt & Co facilitated, Clarke told the court.

Jurors on Friday saw images and footage of employees of Stunt & Co and Fowler Oldfield unpacking and counting enormous volumes of cash.

“There may be lots of talk about gold, but … this case is about cash—a lot of it,” Clarke told jurors. “Have you ever seen such large piles of cash, even in a bank, being counted on a counter? This is a case about £266 million in street cash generated by crime.”

The accused

The court heard Friday that responsibility for compliance with anti-money laundering regulations at Stunt & Co fell to the firm’s vice president at the time, Alexander Tulloch, a co-defendant and friend of Stunt’s who previously worked as a private banker at Barclays and Lombard Odier.

Given his background, Tulloch, 41, would have familiarized himself with AML rules and the financial crime-related risks posed by large amounts of cash, Clarke told jurors. “He would have known that there was an obligation to ensure that cash came from a legitimate source and that the identity and sources of cash needed to be known and recorded.”

The court heard that Tulloch spent much of his time managing Stunt & Co’s relationship with Scotiabank, a Canadian-headquartered lender which entered into a business arrangement with the company in 2015 to supply Stunt & Co-branded gold bars and “Formula One gold coins.”

Clarke told jurors that the venture “made no commercial sense” and that the bank—which is not accused of any wrongdoing—only agreed to the deal after Ecclestone, the former Formula One chief, put up a $10 million guarantee for his son-in-law’s gold business.

Jurors heard that in 2016, Tulloch accompanied several of Scotiabank’s AML officers on a train journey to Sheffield, England, to conduct a “due diligence visit” at one of Fowler Oldfield’s offices, and later emailed them a completed compliance-related questionnaire.

An email discovered by investigators indicated that before the party arrived in Sheffield, Tulloch warned Fowler Oldfield director Gregory Frankel: “Don’t talk about cash.” This, the prosecutor argued, showed that the suspects thought the existence of the cash “would embarrass them.”

“They knew or suspected it came directly from criminal conduct,” Clarke said. “This the clearest possible evidence they were in it together.”

After learning of the government’s investigation into Stunt and his business, Scotiabank ended the relationship and called in the £10 million personal guarantee to his father-in-law.

Stunt, along with his former personal assistant Francesca Sota, 34, and Tulloch, all of whom hail from London, have denied laundering money.

Frankel, 44, Daniel Rawson, 45, Paul Miller, 45, Heidi Buckler, 45, and Haroon Rashid, 51, each of whom worked with Fowler Oldfield in some capacity, also denied the money laundering charge, and Stunt and Sota rejected an additional accusation of forgery.

The trial is expected to last four months.

Contact Koos Couvée at kcouvee@acams.org