12% FIXED on investment..?

What I can't understand is how they can possibly advertise/offer a fixed rate of return on an investment. Can anyone enlighten me?

They are not regulated. You tend to find unregulated schemes make all sorts of claims. Some may be true but some would not be or worded with caveats or worse the caveats may not exist at all.

If that was a regulated scheme, then it would be full of breaches and they couldnt say anything of the sort. For example, it is a risk based scheme with 100% loss of capital possible. Yet it compares itself with cash. At the bottom of the page it says the highest returns with the lowest risk. Being an unregulated scheme where loss of capital is possible then that is not the case. There is not one mention of the potential for capital loss. However, it can say all these things as it is not regulated.

It isnt an unregulated collective investment scheme but similar (as it requires a collective of people to invest in a single company in which they hold shares). This is what the FCA says on unregulated collective investment schemes:

Our view is that UCIS are high risk, speculative investments that are unlikely to be suitable for the vast majority of consumers.
http://www.fca.org.uk/firms/financial-services-products/investments/ucis
Read the link on that page to Connaught which was an unrelated scheme. Nothing to do with the this company at all but similar in its claims and the way it was promoted. You can see what the regulator saw as faults.

Harewood Associates was discussed briefly in January here

The trouble with SPVs for third party investors is that there are too many ways to limit the upside.

Who is actually doing the building? (clue - it won't be the SPV) What happens if it goes bust?

A few years ago I put a small amount of money into a BES company that was similarly structured. It was to buy and refurbish London residential property, then let or sell it. It did this at a time when London prices were rocketing. However, there were a surprising number of connections between the directors of the company I had shares in, and the companies doing the refurbishment, management, valuations, etc.

We had a lot of trouble and delay getting the money out on exit. We did "OK" in the end, about 8% p.a. return, but we could have got the same without the worry with one of the university accommodation schemes around at the time. And that scheme had a name with a track record behind it.

With hindsight, we had no chance of making a super-return because the promoters were always going to be able to apply costs to "our" business that enriched them elsewhere.

That is the best outcome. Worst is that the SPV just goes bust, or runs out of money before the development is finished. The promoters can still make money if they have been involved in other companies providing services to the SPV (such as the company doing the construction). They don't have to be crooks, if they have any sense they will have structured this so they can't lose money.

Any guarantees from the SPV itself, for example in respect of the 12% fixed return, are not really guarantees at all - just expectations. Presumably it isn't even a loan, or deposit - the SPV "has no borrowings" according to the "key feature" which are full of holes. For example, there is an "option to sell your shares to other shareholders" - is that really an 'option', with a right to put at a predetermined price? I doubt it. Do the fixed interest subscribers rank pari passu with the others? How does that square with "no borrowings"?

The promoters might well be fine chaps and chappesses who have had a brilliant idea and the best of intentions, but this is a very high risk investment.

I'd love to know how it works out in due course. They might even get through some successful developments, they are quite small. My guess is that at some point they will come unstuck on a bigger project.

The words 'bargepole', 'touch' and 'wouldn't' sping to mind in no particular order.

robtgossard wrote: »

Glad to see you were dubious. Bad economic times are the best times for such scam-schemes to foster.

Absolutely. Anyone can claim to offer whatever rate of return they want for an unregulated scheme. Whether they can deliver that rate for any extended period of time is unknown and probably very unlikely.