A LAWYER'S LETTER RE CASTLE & GATEHOUSE

This morning we received the following letter from a law firm. Our reply can be read beneath it.

Dear Sir,

Re Castle & Gatehouse, Black and Bone

Received, your letter dated 17th inst., which, please note, should properly have been sent recorded delivery.

To answer your letter, we ask you please to be good enough to state exactly what remarks in our Blog are 'defamatory,'  'libellous' and 'inaccurate.' An explanation for the inclusion of Castle & Gatehouse can be found in our post of 13th January, entitled 'The Role of Castle & Gatehouse.'

Your clients have not contacted us directly and have not explained how the Collins & Bone partnership can be outside their sphere of responsibility. As you may know, numerous investors have seen their money disappear and to date there has been no authenticated explanation at all of where the money has gone.

We quite understand that Mr Black and Mr Bone Sr want to get on with their business unimpeded, but as you can verify from the various brochures we refer to on our Blog, their authority has frequently been used by Collins & Bone when eliciting investment. As the senior directors, Messrs Black and Bone cannot simply reject responsibility and they must be prepared to play their part in clearing up the question of the accounts pertinent to the schemes of Liam Collins and David Bone, Jr.

Our purpose in writing the Blog has always been to get a full and complete account of what Mr Liam Collins and Mr David Bone Jr actually did with money paid into the partnership for the purpose of buying houses for cash. We invested in the Spring of 2010 and we estimate from information given to us by others who invested in that year, that between £500,000 and £750,000 was paid over to them at that period. No evidence has been shown that any property was actually bought at this time. If the correct, authenticated accounts are revealed to us and the other investors and an adequate explanation given of how matters now stand financially with Collins and Bone, then there would be no need for a Blog and Website such as ours, we think you will agree.

We are worried that yet more people could invest money by trusting the schemes referred to in our Blog and we feel that proper acknowledgment of the degree of uninsured, unsecured risk should be made manifest. It is documented that investors in Collins and Bone were led to believe that their loans were backed by debt-free assets and by the Castle & Gatehouse business.

We hope this can all be settled professionally, so that the media do not get involved, in which case names would be named, and possible damage caused to reputations.

We look forward to your reply.

Yours faithfully,

SALLY GEORGE and JASMINE GEORGE

An investor writes:

"The fact that the blog may have caused "upset, distress and professional humiliation" pales into insignificance with the upset and distress caused to investors who believed that their PNs were being used to finance the indirect purchase, renovation and sale of student accommodation."