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INTRODUCTION
This Blog is dedicated to making public some of the business activities and methods of Liam Collins, David Bone Jr and their associates. In the spring of 2010, the present authors invested in Collins & Bone (C&B), who were offering an enticing 8-10% interest on the basis of buying houses for cash, renovating them and letting them out to students. We were assured that our money was secured against houses that they owned, including their own homes and the properties held by their associated company, Castle & Gatehouse (C&G). We have emails and brochures that confirm these details, as do others who invested on this same basis at around the same time. The idea worked for us for over a year, then in November 2011 they told us they were insolvent. They refused our every request for clear accounts, which led us to suspect wrongdoing. We began an investigation and then started this Blog. We found our suspicions confirmed: other investors had lost sometimes quite large amounts to C&B and its predecessor CBS, and all requests for repayment were adamantly refused. These people use and have used so many names that we found it necessary to compress them into CoBo (for Collins & Bone) and Coboco (for the whole bunch of them – there are quite a few!) Note that there is an index in the margin at the right hand side.

Friday 30 August 2013

JUSTICE CLOSES IN ON COLLINS AND BONE

Today the Insolvency Service posted the following Press Release on its website:

Britain's Got Talent dancer and business partner get 28-year bankruptcy restrictions for investment scam

Britain’s Got Talent semi-finalist Liam James Collins, and his business partner and fellow street dancer David Bone, have each received 14-year bankruptcy restrictions for misleading people into investing in a property scheme that never materialised.

The restrictions, which also disqualify them from being directors, started on 25 July 2013, following an investigation by the Insolvency Service.

Mr Collins and Mr Bone gave the bankruptcy restrictions undertakings to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovations and Skills, following earlier bankruptcy orders made on 9 May 2012 and 31 May 2012 respectively. They each owed over £4.5 million to creditors.

Investigators found that from January 2010 to April 2011, Mr Collins (34) of Covent Garden, London, who danced on the TV show as one half of the act “Faces of Disco” and his cousin, David Bone (31) of Middleton, Greater Manchester, took £874,000 from investors promising returns of between eight and ten percent, but instead used the funds to pay business expenses.

At the time, the two dancers already owed over £3 million to creditors following the failure of a similar property business. Between November 2010 and April 2011, they also took a further £187,500 from the public despite being warned not to do so by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Mr Collins and Mr Bone failed to carry out any of the investment activity that investors would have reasonably expected them to do. When investors sought explanations they were misled and the true state of the partnerships finances were kept from them.

Commenting on the case, Ken Beasley of the Insolvency Service’s Public Interest Unit said:

“At a time when they were already heavily indebted Collins and Bone took substantial sums of money from members of the public with the promise of high returns on property investments with no reasonable expectation that they would ever be able to meet the repayments promised to investors."

"The Insolvency Service investigates the circumstances of all bankruptcies and will use its enforcement powers to tackle serious misconduct of this kind.”

Contact Information.  Media Enquiries should be directed to Kathryn Montague – Media Relations Manager – 020 7674 6910 or Ade Daramy, Press Officer - 020 76596 6187.

Posted by IFS at 16:39

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