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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, 13 January 2012

MORE ABOUT THAT BIG INVESTMENT THAT NEVER HAPPENED

Readers of the new Collinsbone blog now have an opportunity to see what we meant by 'troubled waffle.' (See the exchange with Joe Sinagoga for our use of that phrase). Readers will also notice that their blog has a grey background, which underscores the fact that as far as their hapless investors are concerned, their accounts are 'a grey area.'

We would like to make it clear that at no time did we approach the individual who was considering investing a very substantial sum in a joint venture with Castle & Gatehouse. Neither did this man contact us because of the Blog. Here's how it came about: when Liam Collins/David Bone Jr refused to tell us about the actual state of their accounts, we began to contact the companies they had listed as their business partners, associates and advisors, in order to be better informed about C&G/C&B's activities. We wish that we had taken the trouble to do this before investing, because we found that most of those listed had never heard of Collins & Bone or Castle & Gatehouse. Some of them remembered CBS. In some cases, there was a tenuous connection; in others the companies were outraged to be mentioned as advisors and to have their names used in the brochures without their authority. Yet others on the list were simply puzzled. It was through our queries to one of the firms that the potential big investor got in touch with us by telephone. Note that he had not seen our Blog. He would certainly not have decided against such a joint venture merely on the basis of unfounded rumour, would he?

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