Mayfair diamond thief ordered to pay back £250 after £4.2m haul

A thief who posed as a gem expert to switch diamonds worth £4.2m for pebbles has been ordered to pay back less than £250.

Lulu Lakatos, 60, told Mayfair jewellers Boodles she had been sent to value seven precious stones on behalf of Russian buyers.

She used sleight of hand to swap them for the duplicates, and was jailed.

A proceeds of crime hearing was told Lakatos' only asset was the €293 (£245) in cash found when she was arrested.

Judge Alexander Milne QC noted the "striking contrast" between the value of the stolen diamonds and Lakatos' available assets.

Since the money had already been seized, he set a one-day default sentence and gave her a month to pay the debt.

Friday's hearing was also told Romanian-born Lakatos, from Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, was expected to be extradited back to France.

She was previously sentenced to five and a half years for conspiracy to steal.

Lakatos, who was convicted at Southwark Crown Court last July, was caught on CCTV as she switched a padlocked purse containing the diamonds in March 2016.

She left the shop and handed the gems off to an unknown woman linked to an international criminal gang which fled the UK for France within three hours.

The purse containing the pebbles was placed in Boodles' safe and the ruse was only detected the next day. The real diamonds have never been recovered.