London Capital and Finance

masonic

Southeycapital wrote: »

Do either of you know how the investment that investors made was structured then and do you know of anyone that has made public copies of the documentation that LCF issued upon confirming a investment made?

A bondholder helpfully posted quite a lot of info here:https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/75323262#Comment_75323262

The information memorandum outlines how the bonds were purportedly structured.

Botheredin

Supercalafragalistic wrote: »

Just for interest: Copied from an email:-
Here is the response I had to an earlier communication held with LC&F regarding an concern I had in 2017 with regular communications to invest more.
Please accept my apologies, if you feel my communication has been too frequent I will put a hold on your account and cease communication. When my colleague Louisa Thomas spoke to either yourself or your wife on the 5th April you expressed an interest in a second bond with us, apologies if that is not the case.
I will be happy to give you more detail on the bonds. As Account Managers, we are here to aid your application process and to assist with managing a smooth investment process. We do not work on commission, but the company requires certain investment levels per month the service a huge demand for our loans, and so if someone expresses an interest in investing, we pursue the application until told otherwise.
We are not a peer to peer lending facility, we reduce the risk of exposure to loss by essentially pooling capital and lending groups of investment capital as and where required. We match the loan applicants with the values in each bond. Our loans are short term (under 12 months) and the minimum loan value is £500k which means a P2P would be difficult to manage and mean exposing investors to a greater risk of loss.
LC&F are able to absorb a large amount of defaults, but because the risk is spread over the loan book, we are able to prioritise payments to investors when due should any loans default, followed by a significant asset value drop take place. We are currently holding +£215m in assets to cover +£59m in loans, a very strong position. As our business has grown, we are lending to larger and larger companies still within the SME sector allowing for less loans with larger returns and therefore less risk.
(bit removed here for confidentiality reasons)
Best Regards

Do not work on commission? What sales people do not work on commission?

AnotherJoe

Southeycapital wrote: »

Thanks AnotherJoe and Malthusian.

Do either of you know how the investment that investors made was structured then and do you know of anyone that has made public copies of the documentation that LCF issued upon confirming a investment made?

thanks for your help, looks like you two have been trying to warn people of LCF for a long time

I suggest a mistake you are making is to assume that there is any relationship between the web site the [STRIKE]boiler room[/STRIKE] phone help lines the documents they sent out and what actually happened

They said so many things about asset backed, about longevity of companies about guarantees.

Allegedly it would appear that none of this was true and they merely moved money around in a shell game until it ended up in the Caribbean or houses helicopters and horses. It makes Madoff seem sophisticated, he didn't need to advertise.
I guess one similarity is that the regulatory officials in both countries were equally useless.

londoninvestor

AnotherJoe wrote: »

I guess one similarity is that the regulatory officials in both countries were equally useless.

In fairness to the US, Madoff got 150 years in jail and the victims have a reasonable shot of getting about 60% of their losses back.

There don't seem to be many grounds to be optimistic that LC&F will turn out so well...

jimjames

Southeycapital wrote: »

Do either of you know how the investment that investors made was structured then and do you know of anyone that has made public copies of the documentation that LCF issued upon confirming a investment made?

Any particular reason you want to see that? It's a piece of (worthless) paper that said how much they had invested. Exactly the same as the online account that showed a number on screen to give people reassurance. It's still showing exactly the same number now but is completely meaningless.

Some summaries of the Administrator's report

https://bondreview.co.uk/2019/03/27/london-capital-finance-was-a-ponzi-scheme-administrators-confirm/
https://damn-lies-and-statistics.blogspot.com/2019/03/lcf-administrator-report-key-points.html

AnotherJoe

londoninvestor wrote: »

In fairness to the US, Madoff got 150 years in jail and the victims have a reasonable shot of getting about 60% of their losses back.

There don't seem to be many grounds to be optimistic that LC&F will turn out so well...

I should have been clearer, equally useless up to the point it became blazingly obvious that there was fraud going on. And whilst it's true the US have recovered more, as someone else said that's at least partially a function of its size, much easier to track down billions than millions just because it's much harder to spend billions and if it is spent it becomes a more traceable massive yacht or house. OTOH a few million here and there can easily fall off the radar or stables.

londoninvestor

AnotherJoe wrote: »

I should have been clearer, equally useless up to the point it became blazingly obvious that there was fraud going on. And whilst it's true the US have recovered more, as someone else said that's at least partially a function of its size, much easier to track down billions than millions just because it's much harder to spend billions and if it is spent it becomes a more traceable massive yacht or house. OTOH a few million here and there can easily fall off the radar or stables.

Very true!

Southeycapital

jimjames wrote: »

Any particular reason you want to see that?
points.html[/url]

I focus professionally on bankruptcies and liquidations and I'm intrigued as to see how they have documented everything to see if there are any interesting tid bits

Southeycapital

londoninvestor wrote: »

Very true!

The US Madoff trustee and legal system seems very willing and able to go after every institution that benefitted from the Scheme.

For example in one of the images that was posted (regarding LCF) Santander was mentioned , it looks like that was the bank that received the payment for LCF. In the Madoff case, the trustee is going after all the banks that handled payments to "shake them down", implying that the banks handling payments allowed the fraud to perpetuate, were complicit and in any case benefited from the fraud in terms of fees and charges.

Reaper

Southeycapital wrote: »

It seems really unlikley that the persons investing smaller amounts would have had a securities custody account to hold a bond, so I suspect that investors didn't really have a bond in the first place.

I confess to be no expert on the subject but the type of bond on offer here was a "mini-bond", which is little more than an unregulated loan. Unlike a retail bond (company bond) I don't think there was anything tangible to issue. It is not a tradeable product. But I am happy to be corrected.