A British man is facing up to 20 years in jail after admitting his part in a $99 million (£73 million) wine fraud scheme.James Wellesley, 58, admitted conspiracy to commit wire fraud at a court in New York for running a Ponzi-like enterprise where he sold high end wines that never existed.He posed as an executive of a company called Bordeaux Cellars and fooled investors around the world, with some losing out on hundreds of thousands of pounds.Wellesley, a former property developer, appeared at a court in Brooklyn, New York and admitted a single count.He will be sentenced in February and was remanded in custody.As part of a plea deal - which was seen by the Daily Mail - he will have to give up $1 million (£720,000) in profits from the scheme and any wines he had in storage.The fraudster had been extradited to the US in July over the plot and was charged with another Briton, Stephen Burton, 60.Both men had been charged with wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering. James Wellesley, 58, (pictured) admitted conspiracy to commit wire fraud at a court in New York for running a Ponzi-like enterprise where he sold high end wines that never existed The fraudster had been extradited to the US in July over the plot and was charged with another Briton, Stephen Burton, 60 (pictured) Burton (pictured), who was extradited to the US from Morocco in 2023, denies the allegations against him Burton, who was extradited to the US from Morocco in 2023, denies the allegations against him.Wellesley had pleaded not guilty but changed his plea during a hearing on Tuesday.The remainder of the charges are expected to be dismissed when he is sentenced.According to court documents filed in the Eastern District of New York, between June 2017 and February 2019, the two men claimed to be brokers of loans backed by expensive bottles of wine.The idea was that investors would get a regular interest payment and Bordeaux Cellars would keep the wine in storage in case of default.Wellesley and Burton made their pitch to numerous victims at investment conferences and some said that Wellesley was their ‘main point of contact’ afterwards, court documents state.But prosecutors said that Wellesley and Burton ‘had thousands fewer bottles of wine in its custody than the loan documents claimed’ - or just never had the wine at all.Instead they used the money from new investors to pay ‘interest’ payments to older investors, according to court papers.In an affidavit, Assistant US Attorney Lauren Elbert said: ‘Financial records from bank accounts used by Bordeaux Cellars reflect incoming deposits from victim investor lenders.‘These records also show that these incoming funds were not directed to individual borrowers as promised in the loan documents.‘Instead, they were used to make payments to other Bordeaux Cellars investors, and/or misappropriated by the defendants and used to pay personal expenses.‘By using the incoming, fraudulently-obtained investor funds to make promised interest payments, the defendants were able to promote the continuation of the scheme, enticing additional investors and generating additional ill-gotten profits’.Included in the court papers is a link to a video of Burton speaking at an investment conference which was billed as ‘peer to peer backed lending’.In the clip from 2019, he talks about wines like Screaming Eagle, a Californian Cabernet Sauvignon that goes for £5,000 a bottle.Burton bragged: ‘I do quite a few million dollar loans. This year I’ve done four million dollar loans.‘We do charge 16 percent (interest) and we take four percent and I pass eight percent on to my lenders’.In the video Burton claimed to have been inspired to start the business after reading an article in the Sunday Times about bankers taking out loans on their expensive cars with pawnbrokers.He claimed that Bordeaux Cellars had a ‘temperature controlled warehouse in London’ but as part of Wellesley’s plea deal he had to give up any wine held in a self storage site in Bagshot, Surrey.Court documents state that one of the victims lost as much as $150,000 (£111,000) when the scheme collapsed in February 2019 and the fraudsters stopped making ‘interest’ payments to their victims.Frantic victims called the UK office of Bordeaux Cellars only to be told there was no company at that number, court papers state.In a statement, FBI New York Assistant Director Christopher Raia said: ‘James Wellesley and his business partner allegedly concocted an elaborate scheme defrauding investors out of millions of dollars to finance their own personal expenses.‘Their alleged deceit spread across years and continents’.Ricky Patel, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s New York office, said: ‘James Wellesley and his co-conspirator are accused of masterminding their nearly $100 million international fraud scheme that exploited the unsuspecting public for their own selfish enrichment’.US prosecutors have said that Wellesley also went by the names Andrew Fuller and Andrew Templar and was jailed in the UK in 2013 for six years and three months.At Maidstone Crown Court, Wellesley admitted fraud and forgery for conning a bank out of millions of pounds to fund property developments.The Daily Mail has contacted Burton’s lawyer for comment.