A conspiracy to rip-off a Government scheme aimed at helping young people into work has been exposed by whistleblowers.
The Kickstart programme pays firms £1,500 for each jobseeker they employ who’s aged 16 to 24 and claiming Universal Credit, then foots their minimum-wage salary for up to six months.
Last week I told how one unemployed 23-year-old was accepted for a post but the job and the company disappeared once he’d handed over personal details that would have enabled it to claim the £1,500 grant.
Now two freelance recruitment consultants have told me how they believe they were unwittingly roped into recruiting young people for scores of fake jobs.
They said they were hired by someone using the name Robin Lincoln, who said he worked for a company called Ledbridge Consultants Ltd, to recruit for Ledbridge and its client companies.
“We were working for clients of Ledbridge that were not large enough to have their own HR department,” one of the recruiters told me.
“My client for the Kickstart recruitment drive was Marvell Enterprises. I truly believed it was a genuine company and the opportunities I was interviewing for was stable employment for the 16-24 year olds I was speaking to daily."
Around 60 posts were advertised on the Department for Work and Pensions findajob website for Marvell, all entry-level roles in areas such as administration, business development and IT.
The whistleblower said she had some early concerns when computer equipment she was promised never arrived, and Robin Lincoln never seemed to want to meet in person.
Matters came to a head when, early last December, the recruiter said she was not allowed to help with the induction of the new employees, although that was meant to be a key part of her job.
She and other recruitment consultants claimed they tried to contact Mr Lincoln over their concerns that the jobs were not real, but were blocked. Then her fees of £1,800 were not paid.
“The 60 or so people that I hired would have brought in a potential £97,500 in grants for Marvell,” the whistleblower said.
“When I figured out what had happened I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.
“I even met someone’s parent at a Job Centre because the candidate had dyslexia and anxiety.
“I assured her it was a great opportunity for her son – to think there was never a job is sickening.”
Marvell Enterprises is a name that rang a nasty bell. In November I told how it was part of a web of investment companies that the Financial Conduct Authority warned used “numerous misleading statements” to take “substantial” amounts of money from investors.
I have also previously come across the name Robin Lincoln.
He is listed by Companies House as a director of Grosvenor Associates Ltd, another of the firms in the investment web that the FCA has warned about.
The whistleblower told me Grosvenor Associates was also a client of Ledbridge Consultants that recruited for Kickstart “vacancies”.
I’ve been told of two other firms named in Kickstart adverts instigated by Robin Lincoln – Optima Consulting Services Ltd and Hall Contracting Services.
Copies of Kickstart details show that Optima advertised for 45 positions, and Hall Contracting for 43.
The company apparently at the centre of this, Ledbridge Consulting, gives a virtual office address in Birmingham.
Many of the Kickstart jobs listed under its name were for labourers, yet according to Companies House it has nothing to do with construction, its business being recorded as “financial intermediation”.
The accounts Ledbridge has filed to Companies House appear on the surface to be impressive, showing shareholder funds of £32.6million for the six months ending August 10, 2021, up from £19.2m on February 20, 2021. Yet if you check the accounts filed for the financial period ending February 20, you see it had assets of just £285,000.
Not surprisingly, given this huge inconsistency, the accounts have not been audited.
Ledbridge also claims to have 192 employees, but it does not have a website, the mobile phone number used in Kickstart applications no longer works, my tracked letter to its registered office has not been answered and nor have my emails.
Grosvenor Associates, where Robin Lincoln is listed as a director, used to have a website but it is now offline.
It has not answered emails, letters to its registered office or the phone number listed on its contact details at the Financial Conduct Authority.
The only one of these companies with a working website is Marvell Enterprises, which falsely says: “We are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority”.
That authorisation was withdrawn in November last year.
The website also features a page of what it claims are its executives, including business development manager Jake Saunders.
The meta data of this image gives a different name – Robin Lincoln.
“It now sounds ridiculous, but I never even saw him remotely,” said one of the recruitment consultants.
“He came out with excuses such as my camera’s not working, can we postpone, can I phone you?
“After we weren’t paid for our work I searched online and found your article naming him and Marvell Enterprises and felt sick.”
A second recruitment whistleblower says she is owed £2,200 in unpaid fees, adding that she too never saw Robin Lincoln.
The companies she recruited for were Optima Consulting Services and Hall Contracting Services, which have proved as impossible as the others to track down, despite claiming to be major businesses.
The latest unaudited accounts for Optima, previously called Texmoore Incorporated, state that it has 214 staff and £29m in assets, up from almost £21m for the year before.
But if you check the figures filed a year earlier the assets are a fraction of that – just £238,000.
The statement it should have submitted to Companies House setting out who owns it is overdue.
Hall Contracting Services’ latest accounts – unaudited, naturally – claim shareholder funds of £15m and 215 staff.
Its statement setting out ownership is also overdue. Under its previous name of Sentor Solutions Advisory it appeared on a consumer alert published by the FCA which said it and other firms “appear to have been promoting high-risk investments”.
In Companies House records it claims to be an insurance broker, yet in its Kickstart applications Hall Contracting said it was an engineering consultant.
You might have thought these supposed multi-million pound companies would at least be in the phonebook or some of their staff would be on social media, yet they are all but invisible.
In another twist, some of the mobile phone numbers used by Kickstart employers are the same as the numbers given on the Charity Commission details for small newly formed charities.
For instance, the contact details listed for Loughton Cancer Relief include the same number as that used by Ledbridge Consultants in its Kickstart applications.
The number no longer works and my emails to Loughton Cancer Relief have not been answered.
Founded in January 2020, the charity does not appear to have a website and the accounts it should have filed to the Charity Commission are overdue.
Then there's the Giles Herret Trust, founded in September 2020. It's phone number as listed by the Charity Commission is the same as the number given by the Financial Conduct Authority for Grosvenor Associates.
The Trust supposedly exists to help drug rehabilitation in London but I can't tell you what good it actually does because it has not answered calls or emails.
I put my findings to the Department for Work and Pensions, which did not comment on the companies named in this report but says it has “robust controls” to identify and reduce the risk of fraud in the £2billion Kickstart scheme.
A report in November from the National Audit Office found that the DWP carried out “relatively little monitoring” of employers after handing out Kickstart grants, adding: “This means it has limited assurance that Kickstart is actually having the positive impact intended.”
Do you have a story? Email me at investigate@mirror.co.uk
