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.

Monday 30 January 2012

REPORT FROM ANOTHER INVESTOR

Another investor relates his experience ...

"I would like to let you know I have issued court proceedings for the return of my investment. I have not had any notification of any defence and will now wait for the court to serve judgement.

I have been involved for many years in property on a small scale. I have built a few houses over the years and bought and developed a few places for the lettings market, and I do understand the principles of good business. Before I decided to invest, I looked at the C & G website and went to see some properties in the process of development. All looked legitimate, and I was assured any investment would be held against property, so I invested £60,000 in 2009. I was assured the investment could be returned on call, as the Promissory Note was secured by their properties. I later decided to see if I could be issued with a bond to make my investment more secure and was told that if I increased the investment to £100k, this would be okay. 

In June 2010, I increased my investment by £40K to £100K. Unfortunately, I never received my bond, and Liam Collins denied ever having discussed this arrangement with me.

I have been very open and truthful about this, and will give any support I can to make sure there are no more victims in the future."
Posted by IFS at 12:09

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous1/31/2012 9:48 am

    Advice to the investor cited above: don't waste your money on legal action. I have gone down that road as far as I can. I secured judgement in my favour. No money was forthcoming. I then had the following options: filing for Collins and Bone's bankruptcy (and I don't see where that would have got me); doing nothing (which would have saved me further expenses); or doing what I did, which was to obtain a charge against their bank accounts and one of their properties. These charges were granted by the Court. From the former I got the princely sum of £34, and the latter is a charge against one of their properties which is indeed mortgaged to the hilt. Only if this had dragged on for another 10 years would the equity in the property have been sufficient to repay me. Believe me, I did my homework. If there is some money salted away somewhere it will be up to the receiver to sort it all out after C&B are declared bankrupt. You might want to take all this into account before wasting any money on Court proceedings. There is an interesting web site here: www.actionfraud.org.uk

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