The Fatal Ferranti Scandal: How Britain's Computer Pioneer Was Bankrupted by Fraud

Someone should have noticed earlier. £215 million doesn't vanish without traces—invoices, purchase orders, delivery receipts, something. But at Ferranti International's headquarters in Gatehead, the documents existed. Perfectly typed. Properly signed. Entirely fabricated. The fraud emerged almost by accident when a Ferranti engineer in Philadelphia noticed invoices bearing names of companies that didn't manufacture those components. He mentioned it to a colleague. The colleague told a manager. Three weeks later, forensic accountants sat in Gatehead, cross-referencing five years of procurement records against actual deliveries. The numbers diverged immediately. Where Ferranti International Signal claimed £47 million in specialist electronics purchases, actual expenditure was closer to £4 million. The difference had been siphoned through shell companies registered to post office boxes in Pennsylvania and Delaware. James Guerin, the fifty-six-year-old chairman of International Signal, had been billing Ferranti for phantom components. When confronted, he disappeared. An FBI manhunt located him three days later in a Los Angeles hotel room, suffering from what his lawyer claimed was a stress-induced heart attack.