I’m going to stick my neck out and make a prediction: Alan Goodban will never be prosecuted for an investment fraud I exposed last year.
Not because the police are too busy painting their cars in rainbow colours and doing the Macarena at Pride rallies, but because I don’t think he exists.
Last week, I highlighted the chronic failure by Companies House to check even the most basic information filed by companies, including the identities of directors, and Goodban is the latest example of the scandal.
On paper he was the director of Fabcourt Developments Limited and company secretary of Texmoore Limited.
Both companies preyed on savers by offering bonds and loan notes with promised interest rates of up to 10.2%, roping in savers with online adverts that led to lead-generation websites such as incomebonds.co.uk.
They claimed to be authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority and said that savings would be protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, and that their property investment ventures were Government-backed.
It was all lies.
Now Fabcourt Developments has been put into compulsory liquidation in the public interest by the High Court following a petition presented by the Department for Business.
Texmoore, which later changed its name to Sampson Property Development, was put into liquidation in April.
The judge heard that investors lost around £2.1million to Texmoore and almost £800,000 to Fabcourt. Giselle McGowan, for the Department for Business, told the court: “Those are just the sums that are known about and the real figure is likely to be far higher.”
Describing the scam, she said: “Sampson Property Development and Fabcourt Development took investment monies from investors but then consistently failed to pay the promised monthly interest payments.
“What tended to happen was a few monthly interest payments would be made initially and then they would simply stop and at that point investors would have difficulty getting responses from the companies.
“In addition, the companies failed to return the principal sums at the end of the terms of the investments.”
Also liquidated last week were Hall Contracting Services, previously called Sentor Solutions Advisory, and Sentor Solutions Commercial, both of which falsely claimed to protect savers by acting as security trustees.
A fifth company, Clarkson Murphy Partners, was liquidated for ripping-off victims of the scam by claiming it could recover lost money in return for upfront fees.
Judge Barber said: “These are very concerning business models and it is of the utmost importance that the court steps in to prevent any further harm to the public at the earliest possible moment.”
Prosecuting Goodban for this fraud is going to be difficult because, as I suggested when I exposed Fabcourt last year, he’s a work of fiction.
Companies House records state that he was born in 1971, yet according to his LinkedIn profile he left university in 1986, when he would have been just 15.
That LinkedIn profile is then blank until he started at Fabcourt 28 years later. Profile pictures displayed on the company’s website have been lifted from other websites – the supposed chief financial officer is really a dentist who lives in the United States.
Fabcourt’s latest accounts, which should have been audited but weren’t, show assets approaching £138million, while Texmoore claimed assets of more than £34million.
Ms McGowan told the court: “The investigators were unable to identify any such assets.”
These were fictions that they could get away with because Companies House never checked the figures.
As for their claimed registered offices, the High Court was told that no one at these addresses had ever heard of these companies.
Essentially, there’s no reason to believe that there’s any truth in anything filed to Companies House.
As an aside, it's worth mentioning that the court was told of a "curiousity" in Texmoore's filed accounts. All the figures including the claimed assets of £34,206,324 were precisely double the figures in the accounts of a company called Minerva Development Group Limited, and both companies' accounts had identical errors such as missing full stops in the same places.
Minerva Development was shut down in the public interest in September 2020 after taking £2.85million from investors, the details from the Insolvency Service are here.
The chief executive of Companies House is Louise Smyth, who was paid around £160,000 in salary, bonus and pension contributions, according to its latest published accounts.
The Government admits there are “gaps in the company law framework” and says it will reform Companies House so that it will become "a custodian of more reliable data", but there's no timescale for the changes to come into effect.
Besides defrauding investors, Fabcourt Developments, Texmoore and Clarkson Murphy Partners tried ripping-off a Government youth employment scheme.
The Kickstart programme paid firms £1,500 for each jobseeker a company employed who was aged 16 to 24 and receiving Universal Credit.
Fabcourt advertised jobs at its supposed registered office in central Birmingham.
“These can’t have been genuine because of the location given,” Ms McGowan told the court.
“The receptionist confirmed to investigators that Fabcourt had had no presence there in the eight years she’d been there, so there can’t have been jobs available there.”
The court was not told how much money the companies obtained from Kickstart.
PS Fabcourt Developments accounts in which it claimed to have assets of £138million, a figure it plucked out of the air, is not even the most outrageous example of blatantly false company filings.
Take Black Arts, Culture, Music and Films Organisation Limited, according to the statement filed in March this year it has a share capital of £670,661,999,999,334.
Not that anyone at Companies House has questioned this.
investigate@mirror.co.uk
