Comments can be sent to us at irnist23@gmail.com

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.

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

IVA IS NOT A VALID WAY OUT OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR COBO

We received a circular last night from Liam Collins, addressed to all investors in which he fields the possibility of setting up an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) to deal with CoBo's many creditors. Investors will remember that he has ruled out this idea many times in the past, but now that his bankruptcy hearing is drawing close, he is suddenly keen to set up an IVA. Could this possibly be a ploy intended to delay, evade or side-step bankruptcy? 

If CoBo were a regular business operation that had been doing its best in a difficult financial period, an IVA might  be quite a good plan for working its way out of debt. As it is, however, there has been so much malpractice, misinformation, deception, evasion and postponement that we do not think an IVA would be in the least appropriate, neither would it be able to sort out the financial shambles surrounding the Partnership.

In any event, an IVA would be a very poor way for investors to be repaid, since it is likely that a high proportion of CoBo's debt would be written off at the start. They do not deserve to have one penny of the debt written off.

Another, and to our mind, more interesting option for investors is that a Public Trustee can be appointed, either at the bankruptcy hearing or shortly thereafter, to administer all of the assets on behalf of creditors.

We point out here that, since most investors have read and continue to peruse this Blog, it is extremely unlikely that CoBo would be able to get the 75% investor support required for an IVA. So yet again, we advise the Partnership to stop prevaricating and assist the authorities.* That's the only way to finally be free of the 'nightmare.'

________________________________

* If CoBo should protest that they are doing everything they can to assist the authorities, we would point out that Liam Collins evaded personal service of the bankruptcy papers by not being present at a place and time he had fixed for their delivery; he also failed to appear at the Court for the hearing in January of this year, even though he was aware of the time and date of the hearing. He thus made things more expensive and time-consuming for everyone, as he continues to do.
Posted by IFS at 14:20

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)