Staff at Ethical Forestry always knew when their bosses were around.

Even though the business was on the top floor of a Bournemouth office block there was no mistaking their arrival.

You could hear one of their “top of the range, flash cars” roaring into the parking area three storeys below, according to former staff member Susan Cox.

And “flash cars” they had a plenty – between them, company founder Matthew Pickard and fellow directors Stephen Greenaway and Paul Laver bought at least 45.

They included multiple Ferraris and Porches, a McLaren and Maserati.

The problem was the money for their luxury lifestyle had come from thousands of people’s pension pots – and now they have been jailed for the £70m fraud.

Three thousand of them had been persuaded to switch their funds from safe, but not exactly exciting, work-place schemes and instead invest them in planting trees in Costa Rica.

On the face of it, this seemed doubly rewarding – not only were they promised a healthy financial return, but they were also helping the environment.

Another investor who met Pickard on a visit to the Dorset HQ was told he was a “Christian man who wanted to open schools for children in the part of Costa Rica where the trees were being planted”.

But investors were being hoodwinked.

After getting called and offered a free pension review by staff at the firm, rather than getting what they thought was independent advice, they were recommended to move their funds to Ethical Forestry by another employee, sitting in the same building.

Once caught in what the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) called a “closed loop”, within hours papers would be biked around to their home, which once signed allowed the business to drain their funds.

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