The Bucket Shop City of London Markets. A Litany of Wrongdoing!

Some times you look at the Market and realise as a private investor the cards are stacked against you. The corporate hyenas get away with wholesale lies, insider trading, forward selling, fraud, expense fiddling, accountancy deception, market abuse and a whole host of other transgressions. Where in all of this are the regulators? Take for instance yet another ‘one man band’ shitty Bucket Shop’

Readers of Guerilla Investing may not be aware of the aborted placing in Milestone Group late last year and the involvement of the ‘Pissy’ bucket shop that is City of London Markets but here are the sorry details by CLICKING HERE 

That one man could be so instrumental in the decimation of over £10m of market capitalisation is amazing but in unison with (Shitty) City of London Markets CEO – one Mr James Douglas (formerly known as James Turtle) isn’t it popular changing ya name these days to get away from your old life LOL!, one man has. His name? Step forward Mr Spencer Binks – a name that in certain circles of the City will have people both chortling into their beer and recoiling at the name.

City of London Markets (“CoLM”) is to all intents a one man flea bitten City outfit with a flimsy balance sheet and now as a consequence of a ratcheting up of pressure from some disgruntled customers, almost certainly a very flimsy future.

It seems that the fine firm of CoLM saw the opportunity to collect a 5% placing fee in relation to shares in Milestone Group. How to do that? Well usually you have to find the money, deliver and then collect your fee but in CoLM’s case they thought they could collect without even delivering the money! How so you ask? The ‘Modus operandi’ was to use their back end broker, Jarvis Investment Management, relying upon them to pay for the placing commitment and then sell the stock almost immediately after the placing to settle the placing debit. Oh and collect 5% along the way. Good init?

We understand that CoLM and Mr Binks the Fink’ got away with this to the tune of a few hundred thousand pounds in that Jarvis paid the veritable cheque that they wrote (and couldn’t cash themselves!) but having collected 5% on this they decided to move onto a bigger game. Binks and CoLM then, incredibly, committed to the not inconsiderable sum of £1.25m and were reliant upon Jarvis once more in honouring this.

Sadly for MSG shareholders Jarvis were not playing ball on the 2nd larger payment and as is evidenced by the subsequent RNS’s by MSG late last year CoLM were unable to pay for the commitment.

Next stop for MSG shareholders expecting monies in at 1.5p? Placings carried out at 0.3p and a stock price now languishing at 0.2p! Over £10m of market cap’ up in smoke, a company brought to its knees and yet, it seems, Mr Binks and James Douglas still carrying on imperviously. Where is the FCA in this? Why has the CEO of Milestone Deborah White not served papers on CoLM for the defaulted sum and, in the final analysis, wound up the company as well as sending the dossier to the FCA? If they will not alert the world to the goings on here then Guerilla Investing will.

We have also seen paperwork that shows that CoLM allowed traders to transact business (including the ubiquitous Mr Binks) on client accounts without being registered and in instruments that they were not permissioned to deal in. This is slam dunk conducting of unauthorised business – A CRIMINAL OFFENCE. We have even seen email threads from CoLM with reference to what looks to be de facto insider trading. Again, how this firm remains authorised is a mystery and a travesty.

Incredibly the dossier of accusations we throw at CoLM doesn’t end at Market Abuse, conducting unauthorised business and insider trading, but also includes breaching the FCA’s own Capital Adequacy threshold requirements. A quick glance at Companies House reveals that almost the entire asset side of the balance sheet of the company is made up of loans to Mr Douglas that are supposedly repayable on demand. Good luck with that one! We understand the company is actually struggling to pay its bills and so doubt that Mr Douglas is in a position to return circa £40k he owes the company. If our suspicions are correct then he is in clear breach of his regulatory requirements and we urge the FCA to investigate with urgency before any other clients are financially hurt as a consequence of their actions.

Finally, to put the veritable “icing on the cake”, our sources also reveal that Mr Douglas changed his name from James Turtle and that he has also undergone an IVA in recent years. With the rap sheet we lay out here how he can be deemed to be a “fit & proper” person defies any type of belief and if the company remains regulated the FCA may as well put up a sign with a green light to carry out rule breaches with impunity!

 

Viva!

Dan

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1 Response

  1. JStone says:

    It seems the only regulator with teeth and a conscience is the FRC. Forget the others.