The saga of Privilege Wealth has all but come to an end, as the administrators of the collapsed minibond scheme have filed their final report, before handing the last of the clean-up to the Official Receiver.
Readers and investors will probably be unsurprised that the outcome was 100% losses for investors, despite Privilege Wealth's claims that its bonds were "low-risk" and "insured".
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Last October I reviewed bonds offered by Symtomax, an unregulated cannabis investment scheme, which paid returns of 30% over two years.
Last month Symtomax's lawyers, Brett Wilson LLP, contacted me to complain about pretty much all the comments left under the article, as well as some minor discrepancies in the article itself. (The two discrepancies consisted of describing Symtomax's director as a current rather than former regulatory official, and misattributing a Symtomax competitor's market capacity to Symtomax itself, an error which came from one of Symtomax's introducers and was reprinted in the review.)
Continue reading...The CEO of the brokerage arm of Shinhan Financial Group, one of South Korea's largest banks, has stepped down in an ongoing scandal partly involving the funnelling of investors' money into Dolphin Trust (aka German Property Group).
Shinhan funnelled $306 million into Dolphin Trust via derivatives, according to The Korea Herald.
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Basset & Gold, which offered unregulated bonds, "pensioner bonds" and 30-day "cash bond" notice accounts, announced today that it has gone into administration.
[Hat tip to reader John Doe for spotting the announcement.]
As at its last accounts for September 2018, the company had raised £30 million from investors.
Continue reading...Last year I counted over £1 billion in losses from unregulated investments marketed in the UK that went bust in 2019.
And the scary thing is that this was without a global financial crash.
Continue reading...Regular readers (hi Mum) will have noticed a slowdown in Bond Review's output lately.
This is due to a combination of less free time on my part, due to changed family circumstances, and a lack of developments in the unregulated investment sector that were interesting enough to be worth writing up.
The administrators of collapsed minibond firm Asset Life plc released their latest quarterly update in February.
Asset Life plc raised £9 million from investors from 2014 onwards. It ran out of money and stopped paying investors in November 2018, and collapsed into administration shortly after.
Its Chairman, Martin Binks, was briefly a director of London Capital and Finance from October 2015 to August 2016. Binks is also a director of Anglo Wealth, a firm described as an "elegantly packaged scam" by a Crown Court judge. Binks has not been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to his work at LCF or Anglo Wealth.
At the time of its collapse Asset Life plc held two investments, a Kyrgyzstani gold exploration company and an Armenian iron ore extraction company. The administrators have not been able to find buyers for either investment and the only realistic prospect of selling the shares is to the other shareholders or connected parties.
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