A judge has issued an arrest warrant for a disgraced former church minister and banking group boss who acquired the nickname “Crystal Methodist”.
Paul Flowers, 74, was due to be sentenced for fraud at Manchester crown court but failed to turn up.
Flowers is a former Methodist minister who chaired the Co-operative Bank. He hit the headlines in 2013 after the Mail on Sunday published secretly filmed footage of him handing over £300 in cash for crystal meth and other drugs in Leeds.
In July last year, Flowers pleaded guilty to fraud charges amounting to £100,000 after abusing his position as the executor of the will and holder of power of attorney for a woman named Margaret Jarvis.
At Friday’s sentence hearing, the judge was told that Flowers had “disengaged” with his legal team, although a solicitor had contacted him on Thursday night to explain the consequences of not attending court.
Judge Dean KC, the honorary recorder of Manchester, issued a warrant not backed for bail.
A number of preliminary hearings in the case were previously abandoned when Flowers cited health problems, and in November 2023 another crown court judge issued a similar warrant when Flowers did not appear as scheduled.
Dean noted Flowers had “fragile mental health” but that an immediate custodial sentence could be “almost inevitable” for an offence over a sustained period involving a “vulnerable victim”, which he said may explain why the defendant had not attended.
The Mail on Sunday story, headlined “Crystal meth shame of bank chief”, was the starting point for a rapid and public decline in Flowers’ fortunes.
After it, he pleaded guilty at Leeds magistrates court to possessing cocaine, crystal meth and ketamine and was fined £400.
Further tabloid stories followed about his use of drugs and male escorts.
He stood down as chair of the Co-op Bank, a post he had held for more than three years, after a £1.5bn hole was discovered in its finances, but before the Mail on Sunday story.
Flowers, a former Labour councillor in Rochdale and Bradford, was later banned from the financial services industry after the City watchdog found he demonstrated the “lack of fitness and propriety required” to work in the sector.
The Financial Conduct Authority concluded he used his work mobile telephone to make a number of inappropriate telephone calls to a premium-rate chat line and he used his work email account to send and receive sexually explicit and otherwise inappropriate messages, and to discuss illegal drugs.
In a 2016 interview with the Guardian, Flowers admitted taking drugs and having sex with male prostitutes when chair of the Co-op Bank. But, he said, he tried to be “a decent Christian person”.
