Thoughts on Finance, Current Affairs and General Consumer Ripoffs - Damn Lies and Statistics

The latest ONS (Office for National Statistics) data on UK deaths has been released today and paints a worrying picture about the increase in fatalities since the Coronavirus pandemic struck. As mentioned in my previous post these numbers lag the official daily Coronavirus deaths as they are based on registered deaths across the country not just those that happened in hospital. The numbers have shown a significant jump compared to the average for the last 5 years and for the first months of 2020. While the official UK numbers of Coronavirus deaths was reported as 14576 up to 17th April 2020 the numbers using the ONS data are significantly high, in fact they are almost double the numbers recorded. It's important to note that these can also include deaths where the person didn't get medical treatment for another condition but a large majority of these excess deaths are likely to be Covid-19 related. Using this ONS data it shows there were over 26,000 excess deaths compared...

Update 28 November 2024: Robert Sedgwick is among the defendants found to be liable for the collapse of London Capital and Finance after a trial lasting many months. The court found that LCF was a Ponzi scheme and Sedgewick was involved in the deception. He refused to give any evidence in the court case and the judge found this inferred negatively against him as a result. The judge found there were many areas where he was directly involved in actions to extract funds from LCF that resulted in the loss of bondholders money. Original article from 2019: There are a number of people who have been in the news over the £237 million failure of London Capital & Finance including the famous five who have been arrested by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigating the collapse of the company. In addition to the main players there were a number of other people who helped the directors of London Capital Finance to carry out there activities. One of those was Robert Mannering Sedgwick from ...

It's taken almost a month from my previous post suggesting the administration for Blackmore Bond seemed to be inevitable and it's finally happened. Investors have not received their interest payments and now are looking at possible capital losses although the amount of recovery is yet to be determined. https://damn-lies-and-statistics.blogspot.com/2020/03/blackmore-bond-administration-inevitable.html Oak Trustees has appointed Duff & Phelps as administrators to manage the company and in their notice of doing so there are a couple of points for investors that are rather worrying. 1) Blackmore Bond have failed to be transparent with the trustees (no surprises there as Blackmore have still failed to file their 2019 accounts or to produce the accountant's report of the situation repeatedly promised) 2) It appears that Blackmore have taken out loans against properties in the last couple of months.   In the Trustee’s letter to Bondholders dated 16 April 2020 the Tru...

It's been suggested for some time that the official UK statistics for Covid-19 deaths are under reporting the actual number of fatalities because they only include the deaths happening in hospital where the patient has been tested positive for Coronavirus. Other numbers that may shed some light on the true mortality rate for Coronavirus in the UK have a time lag compared to the daily numbers published by Public Health England but the latest ONS (Office for National Statistics) weekly updates on deaths from all causes are due tomorrow (21st April) If they are anything like the numbers from last week they will show a massive jump in the number of UK deaths over this time period. It's important to note that this increase in deaths is compared to the average for the last 5 years and not all may be directly attributed to Covid-19. Some may be as an indirect result such as patients not getting treatment for other conditions or may not have been officially recorded as Covid becaus...

There is a huge amount of info out there about the spread of Corona Virus / Covid-18 across the world. Who would have imagined that in less than 2 months it went from something that was a curiosity in a small part of China to being a worldwide issue with a large proportion of the population under lockdown to prevent spread. There are some particularly good sources of information that I've found about the virus statistics. In terms of raw data and numbers the Worldometer site has constantly updated information. It's updates so frequently I think the "yesterday" tab tends to be better as you are looking at data that is now static and doesn't constantly change. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ As well as the headline numbers it also drills down into country by country details showing infection rates which can be useful to work out how a country is managing the pandemic. Coronavirus Covid-19 Latest Statistics As well as the raw data there are some...

Basset & Gold was a company featured on this blog last year warning of the risks that weren't adequately being explained in my view and this was highlighted in my review of Basset & Gold ISA . As of today it has been placed in administration as per the message below on their website. According to the FAQ section on the B&G website there were around 1800 bondholders that invested a total of £36 million in B&G, giving an average of around £20,000 per investor although this is likely to mask bondholders that invested much higher or lower amounts when the minimum was £1000. I doubt people investing in their bonds were fully aware of the risks to their capital that they were taking. According to the FAQ the administrators expect many bondholders to be covered by the FSCS so hopefully the return of capital will be higher than for other mini bond companies that have gone bust where investors have received from nothing up to 25%. If this is the case and FSCS has prote...