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

 In further signs that the Coronavirus outbreak in the UK is still escalating the daily total on 20th December 2020 is the highest number ever recorded at 35,383 surpassing the previous peak on 2nd November of 31,518 daily positive cases diagnosed by a lab test. This is an increase of nearly 50% on the previous day's total. These numbers are still well below the likely numbers of infections from March 2020 but as testing capacity was very limited at the time the actual numbers reported were significantly below the suspected cases. It is suggested that at the time the cases were over 100,000 per day with around 5,000 actually confirmed by testing. To have the numbers increasing by such a large amount over a single day just before the Christmas period with substantially relaxed rules just seems to be a recipe for disaster. Hopefully many people will ignore what they CAN do and instead keep contact to a minimum to avoid passing on Covid19 to any vulnerable relatives. https://coronavir...

 The review by Dame Gloster into the failure of London Capital and Finance and the role of the FCA in the matter has been released. It makes for some pretty shocking reading and there are some incredible blunders and omissions by the FCA. It appears that they were warned on many occasions about LCF for different reasons but that these issues were not combined to give a "holistic" view of the company. Being unregulated for selling bonds meant that FCA seemed content to ignore it. Despite misleading information on their website and such adverts as below the FCA did very little to prevent consumers from being scammed. Repeated breaches of the information on the LCF website which seemed to be a game of cat and mouse with FCA telling LCF to amend, amendments being made, FCA saying all ok and then LCF reversing them again shortly afterwards. This was not a one off. Gloster Review of LCF/FCA Failure Released There are quite a few comments throughout the report. I can't give full...

The main borrower from London Capital & Finance was a company called London Oil and Gas which borrowed an eye watering £122 million from LCF - over half of the money that was collected from investors and certainly didn't tie in to the LCF claims of spreading lending across many companies. LCF went into administration in early 2019 and London Oil and Gas followed shortly afterwards. Aside from some very speculative or potentially dubious investments that London Oil and Gas made with their borrowed money the main asset remaining is in a company called Independent Oil & Gas (IOG) which is developing oil and gas fields and networks in the North Sea. IOG is a legitimate company that is listed on the London Stock Exchange and as a result the value of the investment in it can easily be calculated from the daily share price. There are 2 parts to the assets owned by London Oil & Gas in IOG. Parts of the loan were in exchange for shares and warrants in Independent Oil & Gas. ...