By Sheila Mckenzie
A wine merchant has wound up in court following observations of alarming misconduct . Dow And Jones Limited was wound up in the public interest on 17 March 2020 in the High Court of Justice before Deputy Judge Jones. The Official Receiver has been appointed as liquidator.
At the hearing to consider the petition to wind up the company, the court heard that Dow and Jones Limited was incorporated in September 2015, with a registered office in Sidcup, Kent, and a trading address in Central London until May 2019. The Insolvency Service, however, conducted confidential investigations into the wine merchants after receiving complaints about Dow and Jones’s trading practices.
Investigators discovered that the company sold wine to members of the public as an investment opportunity. The dodgy company usually sold the stock to those investor customers at double the normal retail price, making it unlikely that investors would ever get their original capital back or make a profit.Company Investigations which form a part of the Insolvency Service uses powers under the Companies Act 1985 to conduct confidential fact-finding investigations into the activities of live limited companies in the UK on behalf of the Secretary of State for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
Representatives of the Insolvency Service told The Eye Of Media.Com that an investigation into the conduct of the director has begun, adding that they have 3 years to examine the conduct of the directors. ”We have lots of materials to pore through. we have only just started looking into the conduct of the directors”, they said. The company director is Anthony Collins, formerly known as Kyrone Collins.
FALSE CLAIMS
Sales staff working for Dow and Jones falsely claimed to investors that additional purchases were required to ensure that a portfolio of wines could be sold quicker and at a higher price”. The dodgy staff also failed to honour customer orders going back to 2016, with the company also having filed inaccurate accounts at Companies House.
In her judgement, Deputy Judge Jones stated that “there is something extremely wrong about this company”, before confirming that the promised returns to investors were “vastly overstated”.
Irshard Mohammed, Senior Investigator at the Insolvency Service, said
”Similar to boiler room operations, Dow and Jones used sales scripts from previously failed companies, which assisted salesmen to convince people, including the vulnerable, to invest their money in unregulated investments. Even those customers who received the wine they had paid for lost a sizeable proportion of their investment, as the wine was materially overpriced.
The courts recognised the unscrupulous nature of Dow and Jones when it wound-up the company and our advice is always to reject unsolicited investment offers that sound too good to be true”.
Only 2 years ago in 2018, intercontinental Wines in Southampton was shut down after they company used high cold calling methods to deceive investors into parting with their cash leading to over £450,000 in profits for the company, despite only spending £100,000 in total on wine.
The director of the company, mr Collins may have lots of sleepless nights ahead of him with a potentially long investigation hanging over his head.Efforts to contact mr. Collins yielded no results