A washed-up ex-professional footballer, who had trials at Manchester United and City, masqueraded as a Premier League star to maintain his celebrity life but is now facing a ‘substantial’ stretch in jail for fraud.
Medi Abalimba, 24, who once earned £4,000-a-week and was tipped for soccer stardom, was so ashamed at his floundering career due to injury that he falsely claimed to be multi-millionaire Chelsea midfielder Gael Kakuta.
He then went on a spree of purchasing luxury champagne on nights out and buying expensive clothes.
During one incident he duped star-struck staff into running up a £25,000 bar tab on Cristal champagne in one West End Club in London, claiming ‘he was a Premier League star and good for the money’.
He also ran up a £9,600 bill at three London luxury hotels, took a bar in Manchester for another £5,000, scrounged suites in luxury apartment complexes and spent £11,000 on limousines saying he had an American Express credit card.
Abalimba was caught after he attempted to buy clothing worth more than £20,000 from a store at the Trafford Centre near Manchester on a dodgy credit card, only for staff to become suspicious and retain the items.
He claimed his one-time massive weekly wage left him with a ‘wholly unrealistic’ understanding of money.
At Manchester Crown Court, Abalimba of Burton Street, London admitted three charges of fraud, taking a Range Rover without consent and making off without paying for £104 worth of petrol.
Nearly all the offences involved him making false representations that he was Gael Kakuta.
He was also appearing for sentence for five other counts of similar frauds in London and Derby in which he claimed to be the former Chelsea star and asked for 19 other offences to be considered.
Judge Robert Atherton agreed to an adjournment until later this month for the preparation of background reports but said: “How will a pre-sentence report assist me in a case which will inevitable be a substantial prison sentence? I’m not planning a non-custodial sentence.”
Abalimba was born in the Congo and had begun his career as a midfielder in the youth teams of Crystal Palace and Fulham, before moving to Southend United where he was paid £1,000 a week at just 16 years old.
He attracted attention from several Premier League clubs early in his career and was given trials at Manchester United and Manchester City.
At Liverpool, he played for the reserves while the then manager Rafa Benitez watched from the stands and eventually signed for Derby County in 2009 for £1.2million.
He was paid £4,000 a week and received an appearance fee of £1,000 as a substitute, and £2,000 for starting a match.
But his career was curtailed by injury and he was sent to Oldham Athletic on a free transfer in January 2011 having failed to make a competitive appearance.
In August 2012, he was signed by Farnborough Town with a wage of just £300 a week and was forced to supplement his income with part-time work as a taxi firm controller.
Fearing his friends would dump him, he took them for a night out in London where he duped staff at the Cirque du Soir burlesque club in Soho into giving him champagne after convincing them he had put his credit card behind the bar.
When a waiter could not find the card, Abalimba said he was a Premier League footballer and was ‘good for the money’ by showing photos of himself posing in football shirts with Premier League stars.
He then racked up the five-figure bar tab entertaining a table of 10 guests, buying bottles of champagne which cost up to £5,000 each – even offering to buy bubbly for a man at the next table.
In all he ordered two jeroboams of Cristal, each equivalent to four regular bottles, and used a microphone to invite the entire club back to his house for a party.
At the end of the night, it was discovered he could not pay the bill and police arrived to arrest him.
At the time he claimed he had been given a credit card by his French football club but the court heard Abalimba had caused the waiter to become a laughing stock across London’s nightlife.
He appeared at Southwark Crown Court in February 2013 when his barrister Sean Caulfield claimed his client had a ‘dramatic fall from grace’ which his friends knew nothing about adding: “It’s not that he was going somewhere he had never been before.
“It’s the reverse – he was trying to live up to the expectations that his friends had of him.”
He told the court that Abalimba’s career as a professional football player had left him with a ‘wholly unrealistic’ understanding of money.
“There is some background to this, which may explain why Abalimba thinks it normal behaviour to go to a nightclub and spend such sums,” he added.
“It would appear that perhaps his understanding of adult life and finance was wholly unrealistic.”
At the time, Abalimba was given a six-month suspended sentence, ordered to carry out 150 hours’ unpaid work and banned from entering West End nightclubs for a year.
But he was arrested again in July after he posed as Kakuta to buy clothing worth more than £20,000 from a Trafford Centre store.
But he flouted the suspended sentence on the weekend of Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 June, when a man purporting to be a Premier League footballer ran up a tab of about £5,000 at the city centre venue.
The bill was paid for using compromised credit card details and he had also booked into the five-star Mandarin Oriental hotel in Hyde Park, after pretending to be Kakuta’s agent.
However, he was subsequently caught by police after they found his fingerprints on a pair of Harvey Nichols shoes the fraudster had attempted to give out as a tip.
He had also racked up a £9,600 tab at Corinthia in Whitehall and the Millennium Knightsbridge.
He has previous convictions for burglary, going equipped for theft and shoplifting.
The case continues.
Story via Cavendish Press.
Image courtesy of Vitesse TV, via YouTube, with thanks
