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THE High Court in Manchester has ordered the closure of two companies that sold airport car park spaces for £25,000 each, with false claims that investors would get a return of between 8 per cent and 11 per cent a year.
Drake Estates Property Company marketed parking spaces at Styal in Cheshire, not far from Manchester Airport. A connected company, Aston Darby Group, later began selling parking spaces in Paisley, near Glasgow Airport.
Investigators from the Insolvency Service found that neither company actually owned the land they were advertising for sale. Money received from investors was then used to purchase the Styal site in the name of an offshore company, though this ran into legal problems and the deal has still not been recorded by the Land Registry.
The Paisley site was bought with f unds received f rom investors in both the Styal and Paisley car parks, and is now registered to Drake Estates Property.
Between October 2016 and last December, the two companies sold over a thousand parking spaces as investments, raking in £ 25.8 million. But investigators found that the guaranteed returns to investors were not car park fees, but were the investors’ own money being drip-fed back to them.
Half of investors’ payments disappeared in commission to salesmen and other charges.
A director of Drake Estates Property was Steven Kane, 61, of Preston. Six years ago, I warned that he was using false credentials while acting as ‘legal services manager’ at Goldstar Law, a corrupt company that had no legal qualificati ons but charged hefty fees for preparing wills and trust deeds.
Kane used initials after his name to suggest he held a diploma from the Chartered Insurance Institute, but the Institute told me he had never even been a member. Goldstar Law was also wound up by the High Court after an Insolvency Service investigation. Time, perhaps, to consider disqualifying Kane from being a company director?