A BANK executive’s wife almost had a night of drunken sex with an alleged conman accused of scamming her out of more than £250,000, a court heard.

Basildon Crown Court heard how Lee Kantor, using the alias James Anderson, convinced the woman to “invest” in rare earth metals and gold through two companies.

She told the court how Kantor, 42, of Chase Court Gardens, Southend, made a string of excuses when she demanded a return.

After making initial payments of £17,500 and £40,000 she then made further transfers of up to £24,000 at a time to a firm called Hurst and Lang Trading.

When she later questioned what she had bought, she received an email from Kantor listing items and telling her she had made a £59,000 profit.

She said: “I didn’t go through all of it line by line, I just looked at the sum and thought it felt about right. It felt good.” Kantor promised to raise a cheque but it never arrived.

In April 2013, the pair met at Cafe Rouge in Woking, where Kantor talked her into investing in gold through another firm, LAK Investments.

She told the court how the pair drank “quite a lot” of red wine and the meeting turned from business to “social.”

The woman described Kantor as “attentive” and the pair later booked into a hotel where she thought they might have sex, although only “touching” took place, which she immediately regretted. She fled in tears and her husband picked her up, but the next day she transferred £10,000 to LAK because she was worried she had “compromised” the relationship.

Over the following weeks and months, the pair were in contact almost daily. On one occasion, the woman accused Kantor of running a scam but he said: “How can you accuse me of that?”

She continued to make payments, sometimes as investments of around £12,000 and sometimes as personal “loans” to Kantor to help him raise capital to invest in jointly-owned gold.

The court heard the woman became increasingly suspicions and visited the offices of Hurst and Lang on July 22, but found the company had moved. Kantor assured the woman the firm had moved to Essex because the “rates were cheaper.” She said: “It seemed plausible.”

She said Kantor continuously made excuses, claiming that people “further up the chain” were delaying payments or that the firm’s directors were being investigated for fraud.

During another meeting, the woman said Kantor’s demeanour changed and he showed her a photo of her husband on the bank’s website and laughed.

Kantor denies two counts of fraud by false representation, relating to two victims. His parents Terry Kantor, 67, and Lesley Kantor 65, of Chase Court Gardens, Southend, and Ryan Wilkinson, 46 of The Croft, Great Wakering, all deny money laundering.