Stephen Cleeve: Commercial Land and legal action

From lovemoney.com

I have been contacted by Jason Marshall, collections director at H&J Recovery Services on 07753-421136, jasonmarshall@hjrecovery.co.uk, www.hjrecovery.co.uk. Marshall represents a client who invested £61,000 in one of Stephen Cleeve's land banking schemes through Commercial Land and saw no return. An out of court settlement has been offered but this has been judged as too low and County Court proceedings have now been launched. 

Marshall is very keen to hear from other clients of Stephen Cleeve, who have invested in his land banking schemes, with a view to taking legal action to recovery money lost. 

I shall be interested to see if following this post I get hassled by one of Stephen Cleeve's expensive legal firms claiming that I am harassing him and invading his privacy. See this 2011 post.

Stephen Cleeve is a formerly banned company director (an 8 year term) and was briefly UKIP's parliamentary candidate for the 2010 General Election until they found out about his past. 
     
  

FSA proposals on wine investments etc. miss real target

In August the FSA (Financial Services Authority) issued a consultation paper how how Unregulated collective investment schemes (UCIS) are promoted and sold with a view to tightening up procedures and providing more protection to consumers by limiting their promotion to sophisticated and wealthy investors.

Unregulated collective investment schemes (UCIS)

We have seen a significant increase in sales of UCIS to retail consumers and are aware of a number of risks in this market. We highlighted our concerns in our Retail Conduct Risk Outlooks in 2011 and 2012.

CP12/19 - Restrictions on the retail distribution of UCIS and close substitutes

We have published a consultation paper proposing rule changes aimed at improving retail consumer outcomes by limiting the promotion of UCIS and close substitutes, and ensuring that they are recognised as specialised products unsuitable for general promotion in the UK retail market. As providing financial advice generally includes making a financial promotion, by limiting the promotion of UCIS we aim to limit the number of retail clients being wrongly advised to invest in UCIS.

For full details of our proposals please read the consultation paper.'

Wine is mentioned in the consultation paper as one of the areas that have concerned the FSA: 'Our work has identified situations where members of the general public have been invited to invest in pooled investments based on the performance of unusual assets such as traded life policy investments (TLPIs), fine wines, crops and timber.' 

Unfortunately, although in a Decanter news story on the FSA proposals, Chris Hamilton is quoted: 'FSA spokesman Chris Hamilton told Decanter.com there were numerous examples of unsuitable wine investments being sold, and pointed to an investigation earlier this year which estimated fine wine investors had lost £100m over four years by entrusting their savings to failed wine companies' the FSA proposals miss what ought to be their target completely. 

The FSA proposals cover wine funds, which are collective investments.  I cannot remember the last time I had a complaint involving a wine fund. They do not cover the widespread miselling of individual cases to individual investors as investments. The £100 million loss quoted by Hamilton was suffered by investors buying individual cases as an 'investment'. Even though they are clearly promoted as investments, these transactions are outside the remit of the FSA. So anyone can set up a wine investment company and make all sorts of far fetched and outlandish claims about wine investment returns often based on out of date statistics and the FSA can say nothing. 

The only possible exception to this might be the selling of en primeur. which might be deemed as a 'collective investment' as an individual's wine cannot be identified until it has been bottled.

In the meantime more and more 'wine investment' companies disappear with investors' hard earned savings. Those investors are now likely to endure a long-term financial mugging.      

Global Wine Investments Ltd disappears after failing to supply wine

 

Global Wine Investments Ltd, which was set up in April 2011, would seem to have disappeared. The website (wwwglobalwineinvestments.com) no longer operates and the phones are dead. The company had an account at London City Bond but apparently there is minimal stock in the account. 

According to investor AR:

'I purchased 4 cases of Lafite Rothschild 2008, for £8.5k per case. I made the payment on 30th April. They have twice offered me a refund, once spent a week telling me it was in the post, but nothing has materialised. They have changed offices, changed directors several times, their original CEO Michael Wilson was allegedly the CEO of a company called Omera Ltd, which was financing global wine allegedly. This looks bogus also.

I was promised by their solicitor a partial refund of £28,000 but received nothing. 

The main culprit seems to be the ex-CEO Michael Wilson, who has several companies with dodgy histories, such as Omera Ltd (06625374) until he wound that up last year. This company was supposed to be funding global wine. We need to get the word out that he is a con artist. People are now contacting the police, hopefully with enough people making allegations they will actually do something.'

Another director was a James Hamilton. 

As well as being a director of Global Wine Investments Ltd, Michael Wilson was also a director of  Omera Limited, which was dissolved last October, and a director of the similarly named Omera Ltd until his resignation on 9th May 2012. Omera Ltd (07845830) was set up on 14th November 2011. 

Global Wine Investments Ltd promised 'First Class Expertise'. The only expertise demonstrated would appear to be the ability to take its customers' money, not supply the wine and then do a runner.   

    

 Omera Limited – dissolved on 18th October 2011 no accounts filed 

Clients of Global Wine Investments Ltd, who have not received their wine, should make sure they report this company and its directors to ActionFraud. This is a central police registry for reporting fraud. Customers of Global Wine Investments Ltd may well be contacted by other scam companies offered to sort out their problems with Global. This is a classic 'white knight' ploy designed to rip off the investor for the second time. These companies should also be reported to ActionFraud. 

There were two earlier posts on investdrinks about Global Wine Investments Ltd here and here.