The pair “exploited vulnerable women,” police said

A KENTISH Town man who netted more than a million pounds from a running a brothel that accepted credit cards has been jailed for five years.

Mario Seu, 69, who lived in Grafton Road, was found guilty of “controlling prostitution for gain” alongside his 65-year-old partner Maria Vittoriano, from Kember Street, Islington.

The couple, who are both Italian nationals, were arrested after police raided a five-storey terrace in Gloucester Place, Marylebone, in May 2014.

Officers found five Romanian women inside, including one with a nude male customer, police said.

The women, who told police they had been employed as sex workers, said they could earn between £300 and £500 a day, with a large proportion pocketed by Seu and Vittoriano.

They found three chip-and-pin card machines, two laptops and nine mobile phones linked to a websites used to advertise the brothel online. Throughout the five-year operation, the couple had been known as Jon and Rosa, police said.

Detectives then uncovered a network eight of companies linked to the address, which it is believed were used to launder more than £1.2million since setting up shop in January 2003.

Detective Constable Silje Mikkelsen, of the Met’s Organised Crime Command, said he was “glad that they will no longer be able to exploit vulnerable women for their own financial gain”.

DC Mikkelsen added: “They hid behind the guise of fake companies to launder the proceeds of a brothel and thought they’d get away with it. But our officers were able to establish what these people were doing and how much they were making from their crime.

“This should be taken as a warning to anyone intent on exploiting women in this way that the Met will take every step to find and prosecute them.”

Seu was handed a five-year sentence and Vittoriano a two-year suspended sentence at Inner London Crown Court last week following a two and half week trial.