Britain’s Fraud Office Probes Biofuel Scheme

A biofuel company is currently under investigation for fraud in the U.K. after millions of dollars of investors’ money was spent on a jatropha plantation in Banteay Meanchey province that never produced even a single drop of biodiesel. The company, London-based Sustainable Agro Energy PLC, had its assets frozen by the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in February after investigators suspected its management of employing unscrupulous agents that sold people the chance to invest in Cambodian plantations of jatropha—a tree whose seeds can be used to make biodiesel, a much-vaunted source of green energy. According to investigators, as many as 2,000 individuals in the U.K. invested as much as $230,000 each since 2007 with the hope of earning high interest rate returns and increasing their retirement funds. But a fraud office report dated February 2012 shows that Sustainable Agro Energy continued collecting funds from investors even after it realized its investment in Banteay Meanchey was going nowhere and making no profit. …