Wolverhampton fraudster who claimed she knew George Bush turns up in Dubai
A GLOBETROTTING Midland fraudster has turned up in super-rich Dubai, trying to talk a British company into her schemes.
Gill Hope, 47, fled Wolverhampton for the US in 2001 after a warrant was issued for her arrest.
The crooked businesswoman became a self-styled charity campaigner and worked her way across America, claiming celebrities and even presidents as potential financial backers for new schemes.
Yet the convicted conwoman, who calls herself Ambassador Hope, was later accused of trying to rip-off victims of 9/11 and was arrested for failing to pay a hotel bill in Uganda. She also allegedly tried to milk money from coffee bean growers in Ecuador.
Now Hope, who served 12 months’ jail for fraudulent trading in 1994, has turned up in Dubai where she has tried to persuade a British-owned company to back a fanciful project to help 13 million African Aids orphans.
Leading chartered surveyor Martin Seward-Case, from Reaction Project Management, was approached about the potentially lucrative plans through a third party.
He held two meetings with Hope who asked him to draw up a cost analysis and run the project management on the scheme, which she said would involve building 2,200 orphanages over four years – at costs running into millions of pounds.
But Mr Seward-Case discovered her criminal past after he discovered previous Sunday Mercury articles on the internet.
He said: “We were recommended to Hope by an ex-employee who met her in Dubai.
‘‘When she approached us we took notice because, in times like these, you pay attention to someone talking about a project on this scale. Four years is a juicy piece of business.
“But Hope wasn’t able to answer my questions about the project properly. Simple things that shouldn’t have been an issue were hard to get hold of.
“Then when I probed a bit further online her name came up.”
