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Michael Marion Emil Anacletus Pierre Savundranayagam, usually known as Emil Savundra (6 July 1923 – 21 December 1976), was a Sri Lankan swindler, most notable for the collapse of his Fire, Auto and Marine Insurance Company, which left about 400,000 UK motorists without cover. As a post-war black marketer, Savundra conducted bribery and fraud on an international scale, before settling in the UK, to sell low-cost insurance to the fast-growing car market. By defaulting on mandatory securities, he was able to fund a lavish lifestyle, mixing in fashionable circles. But this drew the attention of the press, who uncovered evidence of major fraud. In a dramatic TV interview with David Frost, he showed contempt for his defrauded customers, some of whom were in the studio audience, and shocked the nation by denying any moral responsibility. As the police had also been investigating him, he was soon arrested and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment, but released after six, and died two years later, in an advanced state of drug addiction. ==Early life and career== Born into a Tamil family of lawyers in Ceylon during the period of the British Raj, he grew up with a mixture of respect for and resentment of Britain. He served for a brief period with a commission in the Ceylon Engineers but was refused entry into the Royal Air Force during the Second World War although he held a pilot's licence. He married a young Tamil woman who stayed loyal to him throughout a turbulent thirty-year career. When Ceylon was granted independence in 1948, Savundra tried to develop a business career on the island at age 24. At about this time he developed insulin-dependent diabetes that would shorten his life. During this period of time, he was used as a local intermediary in an economic sabotage of a shipload of oil that he appeared to be selling to China but which his American contacts had ensured did not exist. This was in the context of the ongoing Korean War. Having used this device to support the US war effort, he went on to repeat the process. In 1954, at the age of 31, he came to the attention of the Belgian authorities, accused of swindling the Kredietbank of Antwerp over a non-existent cargo of rice. He served a sentence in prison in Belgium. In 1958, he resurfaced as a middle man for a company called Camp Bird in Ghana, representing this American company with mineral interests in the country. He was involved in bribes at the highest level of government and claimed in his diaries that this was the typical business practice in Ghana in the 1950s. It is notable that he did not face trial but was deported from Ghana, presumably because a trial would have led to local embarrassment. But he had developed a career of sharp practice characteristic of a post-war black marketeer and went on with a fraud at the expense of the Costa Rican government in 1959, based on coffee beans. The only record of any offence in Ceylon was a failure to pay an inland revenue bill based on the earnings of some of the economic frauds, but it was because of this that he did not return to the island between 1951 and 1965, when he returned finally at the age of 42. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Emil Savundra」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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