(Bloomberg) — The founder of a London wine-distribution business was sentenced in the US to six years in prison for orchestrating a scam that cost investors almost $100 million and was based on bottles of rare vintages that didn’t exist.
Stephen Burton, a UK citizen who ran Bordeaux Cellars Ltd., was the mastermind of a scheme promising investors big payouts from loans to wealthy but cash-needy wine collectors, who he claimed put up their high-value collections as collateral, prosecutors said. Instead, Burton and his business partner pocketed most of the investors’ money for years, the government said.
“This was a devastating financial crime,” US District Judge Pamela Chen said at a hearing Thursday in Brooklyn, New York. Chen cited one of Burton’s victims, a 58-year-old woman who told the judge in a letter that she’d lost her entire life savings of $200,000, which she had hoped to use to care for her son, who is a quadriplegic.
Burton, 62, pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud conspiracy and engaging in a money-laundering scheme. His lawyer, John Wallenstein, said in court Thursday Burton cooperated with prosecutors by helping the government trace some of the stolen funds and providing information about his co-defendant.
Convictions for wire fraud conspiracy and money-laundering conspiracy both carry maximum prison terms of as long as 20 years. Burton’s business partner, James Wellesley, was sentenced in April to 10 years by Chen, after pleading guilty to wire fraud conspiracy.
Burton, the chief executive officer of Bordeaux Cellars, claimed that the rare wines kept as collateral on loans included the likes of Romanee-Conti, Petrus, Château Lafite Rothschild and Chateau Latour, according to an interview he gave to CNBC in 2013.
But years later, the government said Bordeaux Cellars didn’t have the vast majority of wines it claimed. Prosecutors said Burton and Wellesley’s “brazen Ponzi scheme” took in more than $97 million from June 2017 to February 2019 by duping more than 140 investors — half of them in the US.
After he was indicted in Brooklyn, Burton was arrested in Morocco in March 2022 and extradited to the US in December 2023. He’s had multiple fraud convictions outside the US, including in New Zealand and Australia during the 1980s and Zurich in 1997, according to US prosecutors. He also was convicted of fraud and impersonating a police officer in the UK in 1999, the US said.
The case is US v. Burton, 22-cr-079, US District Court, Eastern District of New York (Brooklyn).
More stories like this are available on
©2026 Bloomberg L.P.