Crooked concert promoters to be sentenced

Three concert promoters are due to be sentenced today for a £1million airline ticket fraud to fly in musicians and models for events across Europe.

Michael Sanchez, 29, Rashid Hammou, 38, and Paul Kelly, 53, launched the scam after taking over a respectable family-run travel agents and hijacking its reputation.

Apart from enjoying a string of sunshine holidays abroad, the crooked trio also used the virtually endless supply of tickets to wipe out most of the overheads for their Bolivian-based concert promotion business Adrian Exclusive.

Over the months dozens of musicians and models were flown in from the south American country for a string of concerts and promotional fashion shots across Britain and the Continent.

At an earlier Southwark Crown Court hearing, Sanchez and Hammou, both from Eltham, south-east London, and Kelly, who lives in nearby Lewisham, admitted conspiracy to defraud between March and August 2007.