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.

Tuesday, 15 May 2012

COBOCO HAVE SPENT THE MONEY. NOW WHO'S TO BLAME?

One person who invested in Collins & Bone has written:

"Where does the blame lie? False promises and mishandling of funds by the partners certainly has happened but sadly we feel we have to accept some of this situation as our fault. We, like, I am sure, a lot of other people were lured by ‘greed’ and the possibility of 10% interest which was so much better than the banks were offering. Everyone also knows the banks can offer full security for a certain amount of investment not so private investment." 

Investors will probably note that this is how CoBo try to explain away their wrongdoing and evade responsibility for the consequences. The person who wrote the quotation has obviously either been completely taken in by CoBo's sales talk and explanations or is in some way connected with them or even related to them.

To say that investors are to blame, even if only partly, for having trusted the mendacious words of these thoroughly dishonest people (Coboco) and to call investors greedy for wanting to surpass the banks' paltry percentages is downright ridiculous. 

The property investment ideas that CoBo sold in their slick brochures could well have yielded a high return; the point is that they did not put these ideas into practice. Despite collecting more than a million pounds sterling in 2010, they bought no houses. They did not even pay off their existing mortgages. What did they do with the money??? That is, apart from buying a new BMW, etc., and spending freely.

Investors need not feel guilty or stupid for falling for CoBo's false promises. Note that Anthony Lyons, a noted property magnate and another equally astute businessman were considering investing £20 million in a joint venture with them, on the sole basis of CoBo's confidence in the ideas they had thought up. Unfortunately, CoBo have shown that they are not the least interested in the work involved in realizing such ideas; instead, they have shown that they are only interested in taking people's money.


Posted by IFS at 11:29

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous5/31/2012 8:00 pm

    This is not greed, but realism. Nobody would invest in a small property company unless the return on investment were greater than could be got at lower risk in (say) the stock market. You can get 5% or more by putting your money in any number of FTSE 100 companies in a tax-free ISA. Add tax to that at the standard rate and any other investment has to offer at least 6.25% just to match such low-risk ways of investing your hard-earned money. Of course for 10% you accept higher risk. But you still have a right to expect honest dealing and for the firm to do what they say they are doing, plus of course submitting proper accounts!

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)