Edward Davenport

Davenport was born in Kensington, London to Dublin-born Ormus Neville Talbot Davenport (13 November 1904 – 17 December 2002), a wealthy restaurateur, and his second wife, Hendon-born Jean (née Gorrie).

His half-brother from his father's first marriage, John Geoffrey Davenport (born September 1931), was a banker and director of the cargo airliner MK Airlines from 1992 to 2003.

He grew up in Fulham, and was educated at Frensham Heights School, Surrey, then moved on to Mander Portman Woodward, an exclusive South Kensington crammer.

It was during his time there that he started organising parties.

At the age of 15 he began selling clothes on Portobello Road before making a career organising parties, first at his home and later in nightclubs.

By the time he was 21 he had set up Gatecrasher, a company organising parties in country houses for public school teenagers.

He also bought up and ran several London nightclubs, including SW1 in Victoria (Pacha London).

Edward Ormus Sharrington Davenport (born 11 July 1966) is a convicted English fraudster, socialite, and property developer.

The self-styled 'Lord', nicknamed "Fast Eddie" came to prominence in the late 1980s as the organiser of the controversial Gatecrasher Balls for wealthy teenagers.

In September 1986, aged 20, Davenport co-founded Gatecrasher Ltd with Jeremy Taylor.

The company organised parties for teenagers at country houses such as Longleat and Weston Park, which were attended by up to 10,000 party-goers at any one time and at the height of their success were generating £1,000,000 a year.

The idea behind the balls was to enable wealthy teenagers at single-sex boarding schools to meet the opposite sex and drink large amounts of alcohol.

As one reveller put it, "I'm here to get drunk and get laid".

The balls gained a reputation for debauchery, with one newspaper calling them the scene of "Unbridled lust among upper-class Lolitas and public school Lotharios."

The balls ceased to be held after an HM Customs & Excise audit found that Davenport had substantially underpaid his Value Added Tax bill.

Davenport was found to have understated his tax returns by £24,672 by falsely claiming that only £3.50 of the £14 entry fees for the Gatecrasher Balls was liable for VAT; the remaining £10.50 was supposedly for raffle tickets, a magazine subscription and postage.

The prosecution described this as a "cheat" and Davenport admitted breaching VAT rules.

After being convicted of tax offences in 1990, he started on a second career as a property developer.

He claimed to have acquired a substantial fortune but also attracted controversy for his business practices such as the way he acquired the former High Commission building of Sierra Leone in London, during the country's civil war.

Convicted for tax evasion, he was sentenced in November 1990 to nine months in jail.

Following the success of the Gatecrasher Balls, Davenport turned his attention to the club sector in 1991.

His ventures included joint ownership with Piers Adam of the SW1 Club (now known as Pacha), and The Conservatory based in Derby.

After selling the clubs, he established a high-end pawnbroking business with offices in Bruton Street, Mayfair, to pawn expensive jewellery and luxury cars.

After acquiring the manorial title of the village of Gifford in Shropshire, he began to call himself "Lord Edward", though he is not a member of the peerage.

He claimed to own 25 buildings in the West End of London worth an estimated £100 million, controlled through a Monaco-based company called the Davenport Trust, as well as property in Monaco and Thailand.

According to Davenport, his business method is "buying leases on loss-making properties, returning them to a profit and then selling them."

A BBC investigation reported that tenants would pay their rent to one of Davenport's temporary companies, which would then pay the owner of the building.

He was accused by the BBC of increasing tenants' rents at short notice and evicting them if they did not agree to the new terms, but he denied the claims, calling them "very far-fetched."

In 1998, Davenport and two other men were charged after running up an £18,000 bill at the luxury Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland during a five-day New Year party.

The three were said to have posed as aristocrats.

They denied the charges, which were later dropped, but Davenport failed to turn up in court and claimed that he had suffered kidney failure and could not travel because he was receiving dialysis.

From 2005 to 2009 he was the "ringmaster" of a series of advance-fee fraud schemes that defrauded dozens of individuals out of millions of pounds.

Asked by Tatler magazine how he coped with two weeks in prison, Davenport said in 2006: "Boring. There aren't many parties there."

The sentence was reduced on appeal to a nine-month suspended term for tax fraud.

He later attributed his legal problems to his being "incredibly naive about things like VAT."

In the aftermath of his conviction, Gatecrasher Ltd ceased trading.

In 2006, his home was raided by police and Department of Trade and Industry investigators looking into his links with two property companies that collapsed owing millions of pounds.

He avoided legal action on that occasion, although action was taken against an audit firm.

He was arrested and charged in December 2009 and was convicted in September 2011 along with five other defendants, receiving a jail sentence of seven years and eight months.

Davenport was released from prison early in 2014 due to health concerns.