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

After all the posts about London Capital and Finance this is finally another blog post more in line with my original intention for this blog. The fascinating news today is that Boris Johnson has been found to have a case to answer and will be facing court for charges of "Misconduct in Public Office" over his claims during the EU referendum that the UK pays the EU £350 million every week. Depending on the signage this claim was either that we could spend some on the NHS or as the sign below shows, spend ALL of it on the NHS. Boris Johnson & Brexit NHS £350m Court Case Boris Johnson had several opportunities to correct the numbers and was warned by the Office for National Statistics that the number could not be justified but he carried on using the £350 million figure. Rather than apologising he has repeatedly continued to state the number refusing to accept that it is incorrect and not grounded in reality. It will be interesting to see how the court case develop...

Jim Armitage of the Evening Standard has reported that various people linked to London Capital & Finance, some of whom were arrested by the Serious Fraud Office in March 2019 have had property & assets frozen so that they are unable to sell or transfer them. The names associated with these freezing orders will be familiar to anyone who has been following the LCF saga and include the CEO of LCF Andy Thompson as well as Simon Hume Kendall CEO of the largest borrower from LCF. LCF Properties Assets Frozen Fraud Office https://www.standard.co.uk/business/serious-fraud-office-freezes-12-million-of-property-in-lcf-probe-a4143896.html

The London Capital & Finance saga took another bizarre twist this week with the trustees called Global Security Trustees (GST) that are supposed to be protecting the bondholders interests (as they hold a debenture in favour of bondholders) voting against the proposals to form a creditors committee. You may remember from previous blog posts that there were some strange goings on with GST. The trustees had been sold to a company based in Malta but are now run from the UK again. The directors of GST have yet again changed and are now Jeremy Friedlander, Stephen Gill and Mark Pollard. Jeremy Friedlander is also one of the shareholders of GST. LCF Trustees Acting Against Bondholders In another twist GST claimed to be representing holders £57 million of bonds. It's not clear how they were able to do that when they have no assets themselves other than £100 but I suspect they were able to engineer proxy votes for chunks of investors. It could even be that somewhere in the LCF ...

It looks like Signature Capital are very keen to get threads removed from Money Saving Expert that give information about their investment schemes. An original thread as listed below has been deleted. A new question is here https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=5991993 This was the original post. Personal names have been removed as per MSE legal policy but can be easily obtained on Companies House. Quote: Originally Posted by  RaymondV I’m looking to invest and have signed up to a number of offers. I keep getting regular emails from one group in particular, Signature Capital from Liverpool. Has anyone heard of this group? The offers are all similar and high yield 12% +. A quick search on Companies House shows the company trading less than 1 year. Interestingly the Director Lawrence Kenwright holds 33 appointments but none preceding 2016. The company boasts projected profits of £37.5 million for 2017/18. That seems quite high for a new company. I got an ...

The saga of London Capital and Finance and their borrowers shows no signs of going away. It's been fairly quiet on the blog front recently but primarily because the mainstream media have finally started to cover the story. LCF Another Borrower Bites The Dust One bit of news this week is that another borrower of LCF has gone into administration making three companies now being run by administrators including LCF. After London Oil and Gas, the largest borrower from LCF with £122 million went into administration a few weeks back, a linked company London Power Corporation run by Simon Hume Kendall and Elten Barker has now filed for administration too. Having borrowed £122 million from LCF, London Oil & Gas loaned £16.6 million to a company to buy shares in London Power Corporation. That money is presumably now at risk too. The dominoes are all falling down around the web of LCF linked companies.

In what will be considered extremely poor timing by the investors in LCF a warning has been posted on the FCA website to let people know that Innovative Finance ISAs are risky. In a statement of the blindingly obvious to seasoned investors it is frustrating to see that it's taken them so long to act and publish such a bland statement. Rather than posting a Press release on their website they should be ACTING and dealing with the companies that are using FCA authorisation to promote high risk products to consumers. We have seen evidence that Innovative Finance ISAs (IFISAs) are being promoted alongside cash ISAs. Investments held in IFISAs are high-risk with the money ultimately being invested in products like mini-bonds or peer-2-peer investments.  These types of investments may not be protected by the Financial Service Compensation Scheme so customers may lose the money invested or find it hard to get back. Anyone considering investing in an IFISA should carefu...

London Capital Finance made the "FCA Authorised" claim on its marketing materials and website but this was meaningless for most investors as the bonds that they bought were not covered by the FCA authorisation and are not protected by the FSCS. So what exactly did the FCA Authorised and Regulated mean? London Capital Finance - What Did FCA Authorised Mean? If you check the details you'll see that LCF was only authorised and regulated for credit activities so for making loans to businesses. It does raise the question of what exactly the FCA were even doing to regulate London Capital Finance for these activities when the administrators report is so damning about the loans that LCF made. If FCA were meant to be regulating LCF for the loans that were made then that seems to be another failure of their regulatory process when loans can be made to companies such as: One that has no bank account Companies that have no assets as security Companies that have never ...