Government mortgage scheme begins
themselves. Land Registry documents show more than 20 of Durker Roods hotel rooms are leased out to private owners. We have also discovered wedding customers of Big Day Wedding at Northop Hall Hotel have been having identical problems to those of Durker Roods.
Meanwhile, a firm called Teva Resorts Limited appears to be still selling investments in Durker Roods at £6,999 per room and two of the same hotels as Merydion. The firm has the same business address in Knutsford, Cheshire, as Merydion Corporation.
Big Day Wedding has no official address on its website and does not appear on Companies House. Its phone number is only one digit different to that of Teva Resorts Limited. Teva Resorts’ director – Michael James McMahon, 54 – is the same individual who was a director of Merydion Corporation Ltd when it was wound up by the courts, a spokesperson for the Insolvency Service confirmed. The spokesperson said there was no action taken against Mr McMahon personally.
A woman who answered the phone for Teva Resorts had never heard of Durker Roods Hotel but said someone would respond to our inquiry. No response ever came.
During the proceedings at the High Court in London concerning Merydion Corporation Ltd, Edwin Johnson QC heard that Rationale Asset Management and Value Asset Management, acted as property investment companies based in London and came to the attention of the Insolvency Service after concerns were reported about their business practices.
According to the Insolvency Service, they found that Rationale Asset Management claimed to prospective clients that they purchased and developed businesses such as care homes, hotels and pubs to sell on for a profit.
Investigators uncovered that Rationale Asset Management received more than £2 million from investors but only a fraction of this money was used for property investment activities. Instead, most of the money was used to pay the directors of Rationale Asset Management and used for other companies in which the directors had a controlling interest. Rationale Asset Management also obtained £1m of funding from a pension scheme called the Optimum Retirement Benefits Plan which had previously been investigated by both the Insolvency Service and the Pensions Regulator following allegations that the pension scheme was linked to pension liberation activity.
The second property company, Value Asset Management, was closely linked to Rationale Asset Management and was subject to a parallel investigation by the Insolvency Service. Inquiries found that the company sold bonds to investors, which Value Asset Management claimed were secured against property assets.
Value Asset Management also sold shares with the promise that the capital raised would be used to invest in new properties. Investigators, however, found Value Asset Management’s marketing materials were misleading and the company’s accounts showed that Value Asset Management was insolvent, owning no property. Value Asset Management also received £200,000 from Rationale Asset Management, which did not benefit Rationale Asset Management’s investors.
Merydion Corporation Limited was closely connected to Rationale Asset Management, the court heard.
The Insolvency Service’s inquiries revealed that £300,000 of investments received by the company was from the same pension scheme that Rationale Asset Management had obtained funds from. Funds were then used by Merydion Corporation to invest in hotel properties the director of the company owns under separate companies.
David Hill, chief investigator for the Insolvency Service, said: “These companies were entirely misleading to their investors, taking millions of pounds without making any genuine investments. There is no evidence that Value Asset Management ever commenced any property development projects and all of Rationale Asset Management’s investors have been left with worthless shares. The courts recognised the severity of their misconduct and these companies have been wound up, putting a stop to this ongoing pattern of harmful business practices.”
YorkshireLive has discovered that a firm forcibly closed by the courts is linked to Big Day Wedding and
Durker Roods
HOME buyers with deposits as low as 5 per cent will find more deals available from today, as a new UK Government-backed mortgage scheme gets under way.
Several of Britain’s biggest mortgage lenders are turning on the taps to boost the supply of low deposit home loans.
Lloyds, Santander, Barclays, HSBC UK and NatWest will be among the first to launch mortgages under the scheme, with Virgin Money following next month. The number of low deposit mortgages on the market shrank dramatically in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, as lenders became much more cautious.
The new scheme will tackle this by helping first-time buyers or current home owners secure a mortgage with just a 5pc deposit to buy a house for up to £600,000. It will work by offering lenders the guarantee they need to provide mortgages that cover the other 95%, subject to the usual affordability checks.
The UK Government said that when asked, 69% of private renters who had looked into a mortgage said they could not find many deals with a low deposit.