I’ll probably never know the true identify of the person who has been phoning me, using an arsenal of hard-sell tactics to try to get hold of my savings.
The name he used was Joe Dennis, which I assume to be a pseudonym.
The business he works for is called Eco Investors Limited, and according to Companies House records there is one director, Anthony Irons.
This could also be made up because, incredibly, Companies House does not verify the identity of directors.
Mr Dennis, who presumably did not know that I’m a journalist, has been urging me to buy bonds in building company Nalu Homes that offer 12% returns, with a minimum investment of £5,000.
He stated in his opening phone call: “We are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority very closely.”
This is an outright lie, the company is not regulated.
Bonds paying as much as 12% will be unregulated and high risk, but Mr Dennis conveyed the opposite impression.
“For the majority of our portfolio we tend to cater to the more risk-averse, retirees, those that have a lump sum to invest to generate monthly or annual income,” he said.
He stressed that Nalu Homes was a successful company, valued at £8.4million according to its latest accounts. He did not reveal that the accounts also show it made a £546,000 loss, something that potential investors ought to be told if they are to make an informed decision.
An equally important omission was his failure to advise me to seek independent financial advice before putting my savings into high-risk bonds.
Mr Dennis boasted several times: “We are based in Canary Wharf”, presumably thinking that an office in London’s financial district gives Eco Investors credibility.
However, they are only based there to the extent that their registered office is in virtual office space in Canary Wharf.
He also maintained that the company had been working with Nalu Homes since 2017 - an impossibility since Eco Investors was only incorporated in September 2020.
“All of the products we supply have FCA-regulated security trustees, administrations, and so on, so they’ve all gone through the mandatory regulation process and got the tick of approval,” he went on.
It is true that the Nalu Homes investment bond is managed by a company called London Court Limited, which is regulated - though the FCA has placed significant restrictions on it including a bar on financial promotions.
But the bond itself is an unregulated product and investors will not be covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme – something Mr Dennis never mentioned. It is not even traded in the UK, but on the Vienna stock exchange.
High-risk bonds like this should only be marketed to sophisticated or high-net-worth investors.
When I told him that I was neither, he still persisted in trying to sell them. “I wouldn’t let that put you off,” he said breezily, trying to get me to ignore this vital consumer safeguard.
“It’s a standardised risk warning that all markets have to put on paperwork.”
When he sensed that I might not bite, he turned up the pressure, warning that this chance to buy the bonds would soon expire.
After that, he said, there will be “no future opportunities to get involved in a 12% bond with Nalu Homes”.
After four phone calls from Mr Dennis, I sent Eco Investors a lengthy email detailing his shabby tactics and asking it to comment.
“Although we are not regulated by the FCA, we aim to conduct our business using the guidelines set by regulation,” it replied.
“These principles include ensuring the information provided to our prospective clients is accurate and not misleading.
“The employee you spoke to has been working with us for a short period of time, and we now realise more training needs to be given to maintain the high standard we expect of our staff.”
The email was signed by the director Anthony Irons, but does this person even exist? I cannot find any record of Irons of Eco Investors on social media or as a director of any other company, and the company would not answer my questions about him.
Companies House records are no help either because the address he lists is the same as that listed by Eco Investors - a virtual office.
Nalu Homes has one director, 38-year-old Jamie MacDonald Murray of Barnstaple, Devon, who has now sacked Eco Investors as its bond promoter.
“We are grateful to The Daily Mirror for uncovering these unfortunate events and for bringing these allegations about a third party to our attention as soon as they did,” the company said in a statement.
“We have taken swift and decisive action as a result.
“We would like to reassure current and future investors that these allegations do not implicate us directly and that their funds remain unaffected.”
Which is great, but the fact is, were I to invest in this lot and it all goes pear-shaped, there’s no useful public domain information about Eco Investors Limited that I could use to trace them.
The failure of Companies House to publish what should be essential details about directors combined with its failure to verify the details that it does get is a charlatan’s dream, one that puts the public at risk of serious financial harm.
A separate case exposes even more starkly the hopelessness of Companies House in fighting scams.
CK Sales Limited exploited the pandemic by claiming to provide masks and other personal protective equipment, getting £80,000 from local authorities plus a £50,000 Bounce Back Loan. But it was all a fraud – there was no PPE, and the company has now been wound up by the High Court along with associated company Lambden Smart Solutions Limited, which also received a £50,000 loan.
An Insolvency Service investigation found that neither company had ever traded in PPE – or any other business – and both were “systematically defrauding taxpayers”. Could the records filed at Company House help find the culprits? No chance.
The landlord of the registered address of CK Sales in Manchester told investigators he had never heard of the company, while the registered address of Lambden Smart Solutions does not exist.
There is some hope of change for the better. If there’s one good thing that might come out of the war in Ukraine, it’s the efforts to stop Russian oligarchs using Britain to launder their dirty money that might lead to a wider clean up of Companies House.
It’s sorely needed. For too long all sorts of shysters have been getting away with exploiting limited company status to lend credibility to their opaque operations.
But rather action the Government has published a discussion White Paper on Companies House reform.
“This is at best a half measure,” said Labour MP Liam Byrne. “Companies House has 11,000 shell companies where there is no person of significant control registered, yet there have been only 112 prosecutions, which is just 1%.”
Fellow Labour MP Margaret Hodge said: “I am dismayed that all we are getting is a White Paper.
“We had an extensive consultation, completed a year ago, which built plenty of consensus around the reforms that were necessary.
“We do not need a White Paper, we need legislation.”
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng insisted that the proposed reforms would turn Companies House into “a custodian of accurate and detailed information”.
But, worryingly, some of the proposals in the Corporate Transparency White Paper could actually make Companies House less transparent.
It is recommended that “individuals can apply to suppress historic personal information that remains on the public record”.
One consequence could be that dodgy directors with a string of failed firms behind them could hide their business history.
There’s already an alarming lack of transparency.
The 2006 Companies Act allowed all directors to hide their real home addresses and instead use “service addresses”.
As I argued in vain at the time in my evidence to the public consultation, the use of service addresses would provide a smoke screen for all manner of charlatans.
Things got worse in 2015 when publicly available records were changed to include only the partial date of birth of directors, giving just the month and year, not the day.
This can make it impossible to establish if directors of one company are the same people who ran other companies, particularly if they have common names.
More restrictions are likely to further disadvantage members of the public who have legitimate reasons for wanting to investigate the directors of limited companies.
investigate@mirror.co.uk
