A flamboyant fraudster from Wembley who conned a shipping firm out of £73million by claiming he was the Pope’s banker will be sentenced today.

Luis Nobre, 49, of Tristan Court in King George Crescent, posed as a multi-millionaire and lived in five-star hotels as part of an elaborate scam cooked up by a criminal gang to con Dutch shipping company Allseas Group Ltd out of vast sums of cash.

To lure them into parting with their money, the gang boasted they had access to ‘secret and lucrative’ trading and could deliver returns of up to 1,200 per cent through a platform connected to the Vatican via the Spanish royal family.

Champagne-sipping Nobre also boasted he traded billions of dollars for China’s biggest sovereign wealth fund and attempted to woo two HSBC employees into his web of fraud by holding a meeting for just four people in the hotel’s vast ballroom.

He then attempted to buy the hotel itself as well as a £40 million mansion despite having no legitimate income.

Last week he was convicted at Southwark Crown Court of one count of acquiring criminal property, five counts of transferring criminal property and three counts of possession of articles for use in fraud, all of which he denied.