A MAN has been accused of duping 900 people out of their savings using a secretive Scottish “tax haven” firm.

Belarussian Vladislav Shevelenko promised investors returns of between 100 and 300 per cent a month if they put their money into a finance firm officially based in central Glasgow.

The 24-year-old was last week formally accused of fraud after heading what local media in Belarus have described as a classic pyramid scam using a Scottish limited partnership or SLP called New Assets Union or NAU.

The Shevelenko case comes after The Herald late last year revealed another SLP had been used at the heart of a far bigger get-rich-quick scheme affecting hundreds of thousands of people from Spain to Kazakhsan.

Transparency campaigners have described SLPs, still openly advertised

globally as an alternative to tax haven shell firms, as “Britain’s home grown secrecy vehicle”.

Mr Shevelenko is accused of running a pyramid from February 2015 until April 2016. He recruited investors in a series of slick YouTube videos.

In one later video he arrives on camera in a Mercedes Benz and explains he cannot answer 200 phone calls a day because he is too busy making money.

A happy client arrives in a new BMW, thanks Mr Shevelenko profusely for his help while waving a bundle of cash US dollars in to the camera.

Law enforcement agencies in Belarus said he carried out no real world economic activity. Instead, they allege, Mr Shevelenko hired plush hotels to hold seminars for investors who were paid only from the income of new individuals recruited in to the scheme.

A spokesman for the Investigative Committee, the main law enforcement body which prepares material for the court system, laid out the scheme. He said: “In order to attract more investors, the young man spread demonstrably false information that his project was making money from binary options and bookmaking, as well as from wholesale sale of Chinese goods and letting.”

Investors were rewarded for bringing their friends and family into the scheme. Anyone signing up 100 people was told they would get an iPhone.

Mr Shevelenko is currently in prison pending his trial for “large-scale fraud”. Authorities in Belarus, where there are no juries, routinely reveal the case against those they accuse of criminality.

New Assets Union LP was formed in November 2015 with two opaque partners, from an unknown jurisdiction but with the same names and agents as companies from the Caribbean island of Nevis. The SLP was registered at a branch of Mailboxes Etc in Glasgow’s West George Street until it was dissolved in April 2017.

Pyramid schemes grew in the former Soviet Union after Communism collapsed then had an internet-fuelled renaissance.