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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.

Monday, 26 March 2012

WHICH IS THE BEST WAY TO GET OUR MONEY BACK?

Question: I agree that CoBo have been careless and incompetent. They may also have been dishonest. However, if they are bankrupted, won't I just lose all my money? Doesn't an IVA  (Individual Voluntary Agreement)  make more sense for investors?

Answer: Obviously, the outcome of either process cannot be known in advance. For investors  who hold unsecured promissory notes (PNs), there is no guarantee either way. It’s true that in an IVA, a promise is made to repay a proportion of the money owed over a long period of time, but promises can be broken - in fact, the PNs that investors hold amount to nothing more than broken promises. Furthermore, if investors agree to an IVA which offers to repay a percentage of their loan—for example 50%—and the IVA fails, resulting in bankruptcy for CoBo, the IVA agreement will have reduced the amount each investor can claim by 50%!

As CoBo have consistently refused to give any proper accounts, it is impossible to know the likely outcome of bankruptcy. The main advantage is that the assets would be taken out of their hands and the finances examined by experts. CoBo claim that investors would lose everything by bankrupting them, but the authorities are bound by law to manage a bankrupt’s estate to the maximum benefit of the creditors. And unlike CoBo, the authorities have to be transparent and fully accountable.

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