Directors of Tullett Brown, Foxstone Carr, Carvier Limited get 14 year director bans

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By Chris Lang

In June 2012, REDD-Monitor wrote about a company called Carvier Limited. The company was offering 3 million “Sustainability Credit Units” from an area of forest in Brazil. Carvier Limited was a scam.

Carvier Limited was part of a land banking and carbon credit scam run by three brothers: Barinua Carr Nwikpo, John Ekpobari Nwikpo and Daniel Nwikpo. A fourth man, Bradley Peter Ferry, was also involved.

A series of scam companies

The authorities have been aware of the Nwikpo/Ferry scam for several years. In March 2012, four companies that were part of the scam (Tamar Ltd, Johnnystone Limited, Brad Baker Limited, and Tullett Brown) were shut down by the Official Receiver.

UPDATE – 9 June 2020: Bradley Ferry’s solicitor seems keen to emphasise the fact that Ferry, although he was from day one the sole director of Tullett Brown, “was nothing more than a salesman who acted on the instructions of the Nwikpo brothers”. REDD-Monitor is happy to oblige:

Tullett Brown sold land and carbon credits as investments. Between June 2009 and July 2011, the company conned 106 victims out of a total of just over £2 million for investments in land. Tullett Brown paid £218,000 for the land.

After a visit from investigators from the Secretary of State in 2011, Tullet Brown moved on to the next scam. This turned out to be even more lucrative. Between May 2011 and March 2012, Tullett Brown scammed about 400 victims out of £3.2 million, by selling them a total of 500,000 carbon credits.

Tullett Brown bought the carbon credits from Eco-Synergies Ltd for £600,000. Eco-Synergies paid as little as 37 pence, and an average of 65 pence, per carbon credit. Tullett Brown sold them to its victims for £6.90 each.

After Tullett Brown was shut down the scam continued, under another company name. Between November 2011 and May 2012, Foxstone Carr sold 98,500 carbon credits for a total of £523,900. The carbon credits were also supplied by Eco-Synergies.

Foxstone Carr was shut down in November 2012.

Carvier Limited was shut down in May 2013, following an investigation by the Insolvency Service.

In May 2014, Eco-Synergies and 12 other companies were closed down in the High Court following an investigation by the Insolvency Service. In a press release, Chris Mayhew, Company Investigations Supervisor at the Insolvency Service, said:

Eco-Synergies Ltd was at the centre of and controlled this web of companies in this patently bad scheme to sell carbon credits to the public for investment.

And in July 2014, two more companies linked to the Nwikpo/Ferry scams were shut down. Pine Commodities and Pinecom services scammed retail investors out of almost £2 million by selling them carbon carbon credits as investments.

Know your client?

The Nwikpo brothers didn’t only take in retail investors. Tullett Brown hired a company called Jeff Gillan Graphic Design to produce a logo. Describing their work for Tullett Brown, the company gushes, “The ‘linked’ typographic element is derived from the essence of the business: linking investors with opportunities, and empty spaces with existing urban areas.”

(Obviously, Jeff Gillan Graphic Design was just doing its job when it designed a logo for Tullett Brown. But now that Tullett Brown’s directors have been disqualified, it may well be a good time to remove this one from the design portfolio.)

Tullett Brown also duped the Huffington Post UK. A series of five articles by Simon Greenspan, “Gold and Silver Specialist at City commodities broker, Tullett Brown”, are (perhaps surprisingly) still available on the Huffington Post UK.

“Experts at Tullett Brown feel that 2012 promises to be full of potential for the Carbon Credit markets,” Greenspan writes in one of his articles.

We can only assume that the Huffington Post’s editors had an off day (in the sense of being off work) on the day that this sentence got through:

Voluntary Emissions Reductions (VERs), whilst being identical to CERs in their nature, are not bound by the terms of the Kyoto Protocol and so allow other industries which are designed to reduce emissions (but which aren’t certified by the UN) to produce and market Carbon Credits.

The law firms: Carter-Ruck and Lennons

Apart from the flexible, modern logo (with a touch of the traditional) and the free adverts from the Huffington Post UK, one of the reasons that Tullett Brown managed to stay in business so long was that they hired law firms Carter-Ruck and Lennons who threatened to sue any journalists writing about the company.

Freelance journalist Tony Levene writes that he was cold called by Tullett Brown’s David Hogg in July 2011. Tullett Brown wanted to sell Levene carbon credits. But when Levene wrote about Tullett Brown on the lovemoney.com investor website, he received a letter from Lennons stating that,

“Should you fail to remove the article from the website by 10am tomorrow, we are instructed to issue injunction proceedings against you.”

Levene explains that, “The article was duly removed – including all traces in search engine caches.”

When he warned about Tullett Brown on Twitter, Levene received a letter from Carter-Ruck:

“Should you continue to post defamatory material, we anticipate receiving instructions to bring libel proceedings against you personally.”

Levene writes that, “I could not afford to take that risk.” He deleted the tweet.

In 2012, after Tullett Brown went into liquidation, Levene asked Lennons and Carter-Ruck about the checks they carried out before accepting Tullett Brown as a client. Lennons replied,

“In light of the liquidation of Tullett Brown Limited, we are not in a position to take instructions and are therefore unable to comment on your questions.”

Carter-Ruck replied,

“The partner who dealt with Tullett Brown is no longer at Carter-Ruck. Also, as you are aware, Tullett Brown is now in liquidation. We have no instructions to respond to your questions.”

A brief exchange between Levene and the Daily Mail‘s Tony Hetherington followed a July 2012 article about Tullett Brown by Andrew Penman in The Mirror:

No prosecutions, no money returned

So, what happened to the Nwikpo brothers and Bradley Ferry? Their companies were caught duping the public out of a total of at least £7.7 million. (We don’t know how much Carvier scammed from people and there may be, for all I know, other companies involved.)

All four have been disqualified from acting as director of any company for 14 years.

But none of them has been prosecuted, and they have been allowed to keep all of their victim’s money.
 

Full Disclosure: This post is part of a series of posts and interviews about REDD in Brazil, with funding from Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung e.V. Click here for all of REDD-Monitor’s funding sources.
 

7 thoughts on “Directors of Tullett Brown, Foxstone Carr, Carvier Limited get 14 year director bans”

  1. It sounds like the game playing that accompanies credit trading makes this option more trouble than help. Are we better off then to have our governments tax carbon emissions and insure that a significant portion of that money goes to REDD+?

  3. 14 years is not long enough, life is a start…. provided they don’t change names by deed poll which I know has been done B4 and skirted FSA (correct name at time) by back door. Some of these guys have ruined peoples lives and depleted retirement savings yet get to keep funds gained by deception? How is this just for ruined lives? The system is fundamentally flawed and correct me if I’m wrong here, appears to give a green light to this kind of scam..

  4. that bradley ferry fraudster is now working at a unregulated company called hawthorne harper and again selling scam things to public. it needs to stop!

  6. Great they are banned but they should be jailed. I also fail to understand why, when they have been found guilty, why have no monies been recovered and redistributed. To my mind it hugely incentivises further criminality!

  7. An article about Tullett Brown from June 2012:

    Turning carbon into gold: UK court liquidates CO2 broker

    27 Jun 2012 07:40 AM http://www.pointcarbon.com

    LONDON, June 27 (Reuters Point Carbon) – A UK court has wound up a company it says misled private investors by comparing near worthless carbon credits to gold, the latest in a string of firms found to market poor quality offsets to the general public in a practice that financial regulators say has grown exponentially in the past 18 months.

    At the High Court in London on Wednesday, the UK government was successful in its request to liquidate Tullett Brown, a firm it said made 1.6 million pounds by misleading customers into buying unregulated credits at almost four times what it paid for them.

    Last month, another probe by the Insolvency Service prompted the High Court to shut down a web of companies that it says made 6.5 million pounds by mis-selling land and carbon credits and were linked by the name Manor Rose.

    The business practice often involves cold-calling and misleading private investors into thinking they were buying U.N. carbon credits that can be used by governments and companies to meet legally-binding emission reduction targets.

    In fact, the credits offered were not regulated by the U.N. and were unlikely to meet future price projections for U.N. credits that the sellers portrayed in glossy marketing brochures from banks such as Barclays.

    No-one from Tullett Brown was willing to comment on the record, but a former employee denied portraying the credits as U.N.-issued units, but did admit some employees had no experience whatsoever in financial markets.

    “It’s an unregulated market, so many people trading are themselves unregulated,” he said on condition of anonymity.

    CONCERNED

    Despite lacking many powers to stop the firms from marketing voluntary credits, the UK Financial Services Authority is concerned about the rise in the practice.

    “We suspect that many of the firms and individuals who were previously selling land are now selling carbon credits. The figures appear to support this,” said Jonathan Phelan, an official with the Financial Services Authority.

    Having received no reports about firms selling carbon credits in 2010, 78 firms were brought to the FSA’s attention in 2011 and a further 38 in the first six months of the year, he said.

    The Insolvency Service, which investigated Tullett Brown, said it couldn’t provide a figure on how much mis-selling of carbon units had cost investors, but it did say that 78 rogue companies that raked in over 28 million pounds from the public through selling different assets have been shut down in the past three years.

    However, the full extent of losses is likely to be much bigger because many victims fail to report that they have been tricked.

    “Many are high-earning retired professionals and don’t want to contact the authorities because they feel embarrassed,” said Joe Peacock of the Insolvency Service, who led the investigation into Tullett Brown.

    PERSISTENT

    Anne Reid, 60, a former tax inspector from Wales, said she was duped into parting with 12,088 pounds for 1,725 voluntary carbon credits by a Tullett Brown salesman who promised they were regulated by the U.N.

    Although she cannot be sure, she believes the company got her information from a telesales firm carrying out a consumer survey who asked her if she would be interested in green investments.

    The calls began in August and the salesman telephoned every week for six weeks.

    “He said we could get returns of up to 25 percent in 15 months,” she said, adding that large corporations were touted as potential buyers of the credits in the future.

    “He gave the impression he was looking at a whiteboard and wiping the projects off the list as they got sold and we had be quick or we could miss out,” she said.

    “Everything came in a fabulous folder and we even got a personal Christmas card,” Anne said, adding that he had invited her and her husband for lunch in London later in the year.

    RISKY

    When the calls stopped and the emails bounced back, Anne became concerned that the investment might not be what it seemed.

    Paul Bolton, of Hampshire, said he paid 2,000 pounds for 300 credits from an Indian hydro project marketed by Tullett Brown.

    He said he was also promised generous returns, but when he wanted to sell the credits was told by another salesman that his initial investment was too small and that he would have to purchase a larger amount to secure a buyer.

    He turned down the offer.

    Christine Derrett, the Court Registrar who wound up Tullett Brown, said the company had promised returns as much as 50-150 percent, “compared credits to gold” and said that investors weren’t able to access their credits online as promised.

    “I think people would be better off planting trees rather than investing in carbon credits. It seems like a very risky market to get into,” she added.

    By John McGarrity and Susanna Twidale

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