The Candy brothers, two of London’s best known luxury property developers, were swindled by four pensioners who sold them a 47-acre Berkshire estate that they did not own. The brothers, who are both in their mid-thirties, and their bankers, HBOS, have emerged as the victims of an audacious quartet of fraudsters in their sixties and early seventies who were jailed last week.

Nick and Christian Candy and the bank thought they were purchasing King’s Beeches in Sunninghill, an estate that belongs to a billionaire Sau-di sheikh, Khalid Bin Mahfouz. In 2004 they paid £6.5 million for the estate, which was once owned by the King of Thailand, on the basis of forged paperwork lodged with the Land Registry, which suggested the pensioners were the real owners.

The sheikh was unaware of the fraudulent sale, which was made in 2004, some time before the Candy brothers rose to preeminence as developers for London’s super-rich.

The fraudsters had completed a Land Registry transfer form to shift the property of King’s Beeches from Glenside Holdings, (Bermuda), a vehicle of the sheikh, to another similarly named company, Glenside Investments.

In October 2004 the estate was sold to a vehicle of Christian Candy. Later as the property market in London boomed, the Candy Brothers became household names, at least for the capital’s richest householders. Among their high-end deals was the £1 billion purchase of Chelsea Barracks last year. They are also behind the luxury development 1 Hyde Park.

When the deceit emerged, the brothers won a separate civil case against the Land Registry, which records and upholds land rights. For inadvertently allowing the deal to go through, the body was forced to make its largest ever compensation payment of £8 million, including legal fees, which was shared between the brothers and HBOS.

Though it had been a victim of forged documents, the Land Registry has a policy of compensating for any mistakes made on the register.

Michael Downer, 71, was jailed for five years, John Clifford Williams, 65, for two and a half, John Mervyn Jones, 62, for six, and Malcolm Brown, 69, for four years and nine months. Sentencing the men last week, Judge Nicholas Wood said it was a “great shame” to see men of their age committing such a crime.

Christian Candy told The Financial Times that he thought there would be a rise in the number of such cases uncovered during the course of the recession.

mods, please remove if this article breaks forum rules...........

but my question is how much land does the King own in the UK, or used to own????