This is how much Scarborough's former City trader James Rintoul will have to repay his victims after conning them out of £1.2m

James Rintoul, 62, appeared at York Crown Court on Thursday when judge Sean Morris ordered him to pay £645,323 compensation to the estates of his former business partners who were duped by the former Scarborough man after being persuaded to invest in an oil-trading scheme.

Rintoul - who was jailed for nearly three years in 2013 after being convicted of fraud - surrendered himself to police when his oil-investment business was about to collapse, leaving his nine investors thousands of pounds out of pocket.

The disgraced former businessman set up Fuel Pulse Ltd in August 2008, confident that his expertise in oil trading would result in a profit for a handful of friends and business partners.

However, the worldwide recession led to a trade slump and Rintoul had to find new investors in a doomed bid to keep the scheme afloat.

Rintoul, formerly of Wykeham, hid the true scale of the losses from his existing clients as the fund went “rapidly downhill” from September 2008.

The court heard that Rintoul sent expensive Christmas hampers to investors in an attempt to make them think all was well with the business.

He finally turned himself in when he was given more than £250,000 by a client but instead of investing the cash, used it to try to shore up the ailing business.

Rintoul, now of Newport Road, North Cave, Brough, was said to have been down to his last £50 when he handed himself in to police.

In March 2013, he was jailed for two years and eight months and banned from holding a company directorship for seven years.

At a previous financial-confiscation hearing in 2014, Rintoul was made to repay a nominal fee of just £1 due to his then limited finances.

But he had since accrued assets of £645,324, namely two pension funds including one with Shell, said prosecutor Jonathan Holsgrove.

Rules under the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) stipulate that perpetrators of such crimes who are made to pay only nominal fees due to strained financial means, can be made to pay back much larger sums at a later date if their finances improve.

Judge Mr Morris ordered Rintoul to repay the six-figure sum to the estates of his victims within a fixed time period. The money would be repaid to the estates according to the extent of each victim’s loss from the fraud.