James Wellesley, 59, has pleaded guilty to wire fraud, at the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York after running a scheme to defraud investors using loans brokered by his company Bordeaux Cellars.

Wellesley faced the US court system after he was extradited in July 2025 to the US to face charges of wire fraud over the wine investment scam.

At court in New York this week, before US District Judge Pamela Chen, Wellesley pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, admitting to scamming investors out of nearly $99m (£74m) in a fraudulent wine investment scheme.

Wellesley was chief financial officer and operations manager of Bordeaux Cellars, and had various aliases including ‘Andrew Fuller’ and ‘Andrew Templar’.

In February 2017 Wellesley incorporated the company in the UK with his partner Stephen Burton, another British man, who had pleaded guilty to the same charges in July.

Wellesly and Burton ran the investment company, Bordeaux Cellars Ltd, with offices in London and Hong Kong, and used funds from investors based on wines that never existed as collateral.

The scheme ran for nearly 18 months between June 2017 and February 2019. To promote the scheme, the two attended investment conferences, convincing potential investors that the wines existed, citing their names, vintages and the number of bottles and pledged them as collateral form term loans.

Investors were issued with a loan agreement and ‘chattel’ mortgage deed over wine’ which set out the terms of the loan and details of the ‘secured wine’ confirming it had been delivered to Bordeaux Cellars’ storage facility.

But the court papers stated that ‘many of the specific bottles identified as collateral in the loan documents were never in Bordeaux Cellars’ custody’.

From June 2017 until the following December investors were paid interest payments as promised but in February 2019 all interest payments made on the term loan stopped. At this point the investment scheme collapsed.

The high net worth wine collectors did not actually exist, and Bordeaux Cellars did not maintain custody of the wine purportedly securing the loans. Instead, the defendants used incoming loan proceeds to make fraudulent interest payments to investors and for their own personal expenses, resulting in $99m dollars’ worth of misdirected funds.

In the only accounts filed for Bordeaux Cellars London Ltd in November 2018, the company had assets of £7.5m for FY18, but it was struck off in May 2019.

Wellesley will be sentenced on 3 February 2026 in New York.

Burton will be sentenced on January 6 2026 in the same court.