Liquidators appointed in MJS Capital collapse

Phoenix

6 years ago

David Rubin and Partners has been appointed to liquidate MJS Capital (now known as Colarb Capital).

MJS collapsed early in 2018 and was finally put into liquidation in March 2019. It allegedly took £30 million from bondholders.

After a five-way beauty parade between rival insolvency practitioners seeking the appointment, David Rubin & Partners was given the job last month, according to a recent filing with Companies House.

The collapse of MJS has been something of a footnote to the much larger collapse of London Capital & Finance. John Russell-Murphy (the “J” in MJS) was, according to the Evening Standard, “instrumental in connecting LCF to its slick marketing partner, Surge”. The Surge group of companies was paid £60 million for running LCF’s call centre and ran two websites which directed investors to LCF under the guise of providing interest rate comparisons.

Surge is not accused of any involvement with MJS Capital. Russell-Murphy resigned from MJS in 2016, leaving Shaun Prince (pictured) as the only one remaining of the three original founders.

The collapse of MJS seems to have affected Prince so badly that he forgot his own date of birth. The Companies House filing appointing him as director of MJS shows his date of birth as 30 September 1980, as do filings for Tempus Media (London) Limited and MJS Canco Limited. However, in October 2018 he incorporated five shell companies, named Colarb Capital 1/2/3/4 Limited and Colarb Capital DL MB Limited, all of which show his date of birth as October 1980.

According to the Evening Standard article last month:

So, where did MJS investors’ money go? Sources suggest 11 firms got bondholders’ cash. One, an investment company called Angel World, is said to have received £7 million and is thought to have repaid a chunk of that.

Another is Ajaz Shah, an investment manager with a business called Fortitude Capital. He says he received “approximately £1.4 million” of MJS/Colarb money to invest in foreign exchange trading and said he now owed around £725,000. Shah was, unusually, a director of MJS for one day.

We’ll keep you posted as and when the liquidator files their updates.