Civil Court

Why didn't Tullet Brown fight this in Civil Court?

People often ask me why I didn't fight this in court. The short answer is that the Government fights dirty – very dirty in fact.

Two weeks before the provisional liquidation of Tullett Brown, Barclays Bank removed a total of some £250k from the Tullett Brown bank accounts (£177,298.43 as seen below and the rest from a separate Tullett Brown business savings account). Efforts were made to find out the cause of the problem only to be told there was a problem with the account that they were working hard to resolve and the money would be restored to the account immediately.

This turned out to be a lie.

They even put this in writing claiming to have ‘Operational difficulties’. See a copy of the letter below:

The lies went on for weeks. We later found out that the Insolvency Service had contacted our bank and asked them to remove the funds from our account. The business accounts were frozen! The Insolvency Services would later go on to say that this was done to protect the investors. Well, this is more nonsense. It would appear that this was done to hamper our ability to fight them in court and is tantamount to OUTRIGHT CORRUPTION.

Everybody knows that when a company is liquidated, any remaining funds within that company will be eaten up in extortionate liquidator fees. How does this help the investors? It would have made much more sense to negotiate with us to give the clients an offer of full refunds. In total, around £650,000 of Tullett brown funds were seized by the Insolvency Service. Nice payday for the liquidators.

Tullett Brown was a limited company (a separate legal entity) with its own corporate bank account. Tullett Brown had the right to defend itself as a business using the funds from its bank account. This wasn't allowed to happen. Tullett Brown should have been presumed innocent until proven guilty. Well if you remove the company funds before it even gets to court, then that is very much guilty until proven innocent.

So, they effectively tie your hands behind your back and then say, “now fight me!” This is cowardly! In a fair fight in court, I believe we would have easily been victorious as the evidence provided here is irrefutable. However, the business reputation would have been irreversibly damaged.

I then had a very important decision to make. Do I now personally fund a civil court case potentially costing hundreds of thousands and dragging on for a long period? Alternatively, do I just walk away and start again? I decided to walk away. At the time, I felt there was no upside as the company had been damaged beyond repair. Already extremely stressed, I couldn't face a potentially lengthy and costly civil court case.

As the company had already been severely damaged with the initial provisional liquidation, potentially spending hundreds of thousands in a long drawn-out civil case against the Insolvency Services who had unlimited access to the public purse didn't seem like a wise move at the time. I knew our company operated legitimately and I naively thought that the Insolvency Service would put forward a case that was based on their view that they felt our investment wasn't suitable for investors. The flipside to this argument DOES NOT automatically mean that you defrauded your clients.

Even more naively, I thought that if the story were released to the press, they [the press] would contact me for comment where I could present this important information. How wrong was I? I expected transparency, fairness and honesty where there was none.

Never for a second did I think that the government and media would invent a narrative and tell blatant lies to the public. They both decided on the narrative that we swindled our clients; which of course was a lie. They used this lie to make up stories, sell newspapers and make money.

Lies told in the civil court

They said that we had promised the following to our clients:

Investing in carbon credits was a no-brainer.

Carbon credits were ‘virtually guaranteed’.

Carbon credits were guaranteed by the UN.

Clients were promised permission for planning.

Our clients were unaware of the land's green belt status.

This was all complete rubbish, none of which has any credible merit or evidence to back up these claims. On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence on this website to prove this isn't true. Our compliance department, terms of business and training manuals prove that these are lies and put the Insolvency Service and media to shame.

The media circus that followed was an absolute joke, all based on the lie that we scammed our clients and that they [the press] felt that needed no further investigation because this is what happened.

Had we been white, the media would probably want to know more about why these three educated brothers with clean records had got into this mess. They would want to understand more before going hell-to-leather to print. Unfortunately, we were black and were not afforded such consideration.

As there was no criminal case to answer for obvious reasons, they did the next best thing; they used their friends in the media to give the impression we were criminals and called us scammers. This is another word for fraudsters, the definition of which is ‘obtaining money by deception’ which as we know, simply isn't true.

The Fall Out

As we did not defend any of the cases above for the reason discussed earlier, their blatant lies were accepted and the government won their civil case by default and Tullet Brown was closed permanently and its directors and shareholders were fined and banned from being company directors for 13 years.