Emil Savundra

Michael Marion Emil Anacletus Pierre Savundranayagam, usually known as Emil Savundra (6 July 1923 – 21 December 1976), was a Sri Lankan swindler. The collapse of his Fire, Auto and Marine Insurance Company left about 400,000 motorists in the United Kingdom without coverage.

As a post-war black marketeer, Savundra committed bribery and fraud on an international scale before settling in the UK to sell low-cost insurance in the fast-growing automotive market. By defaulting on mandatory securities, he funded a lavish lifestyle and travelled in fashionable circles. This attracted the attention of the press, who uncovered evidence of major fraud. In a TV interview with David Frost, Savundra demonstrated contempt for his defrauded customers (some of whom were in the studio audience) and denied any moral responsibility. The police had been investigating him, and he was soon arrested and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment. Released after six, Savundra died two years later as a drug addict.

Born into a Tamil family of lawyers in Ceylon during the British Raj, Savundra grew up with a mixture of respect for and resentment of Britain. Although he served a brief commission in the Ceylon Engineers, he was refused entry into the Royal Air Force during the Second World War despite holding a pilot's licence. Savundra married a young Tamil woman, who remained loyal to him over a turbulent thirty-year career.

When Ceylon became independent in 1948, Savundra (age 24) tried to develop a business career on the island. Around this time he developed insulin-dependent diabetes, which would shorten his life. During this period, in the context of the Korean War, Savundra was used as a local intermediary in the economic sabotage of a shipload of oil which he appeared to be selling to China but which his American contacts had ensured did not exist. After using this device to support the US war effort, he repeated the process.

In 1954, at age 31, Savundra was convicted of swindling the Kredietbank of Antwerp over a non-existent cargo of rice and was imprisoned in Belgium. In 1958 he resurfaced as a representative of American company Camp Bird for mineral interests in Ghana. Savundra was involved in bribery at the highest level of government, claiming in his diaries that this was typical Ghanaian business practice during the 1950s. He was deported from the country, presumably because a trial would have caused local embarrassment. Savundra, who had developed a career of sharp practice characteristic of a post-war black marketeer, perpetrated a coffee-bean fraud at the expense of the Costa Rican government in 1959.

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Wikipedia