BRITISH police say Ross Cowie is the audacious frontman of a counterfeit gang that sought to defraud the Bank of England out of $64 billion.

His Australian family says the 62-year-old grandfather is a patsy.

“That’s the word we’ve been bandying about,” his daughter Tiffany Cowie said yesterday. “In any business relationship, if you’re performing contracted work for other people, it’s a situation where you have to take the word of people you’re associating with.”

In this instance, Cowie’s associates and fellow defendants are five Chinese nationals - and a New Zealander still at large. It’s not disputed Cowie was their point man.

The question to be settled over the next six weeks in Southwark Crown Court is whether or not Cowie was suckered into believing a story so crazy it could never, as it turned out, be true. To wit, six Chinese people, aged between 109 and 116 years, had been hoarding £28billion from pre-Communist days. They had decided to exchange the money for modern notes and share it among their offspring.

The yarn goes from quirky to quackery with claims that the cash included a small mountain of £1000 notes, which were in circulation until 1943 - and only 63 are said to remain outside the bank’s vaults - and the inclusion of hundreds of special issue £500,000 notes that, in fact, never existed. Read Full Article