Banned for 11 years, the £1m bogus investment cheat who confessed
A CONTROVERSIAL businessman has been banned from acting as a company director after making a series of damning admissions about a scam investment firm he controlled.
Brett Jolly, 56, is disqualified from running any British company for the next 11 years, beginning last Thursday. He confessed to investigators from the Insolvency Service that he allowed carbon credit investment firm Anglo Capital Partners Limited to trade ‘with a lack of commercial probity’.
Investors were told to expect returns of up to 25 per cent when the truth was that Jolly’s company had already marked up the price of the carbon credits by as much as 594 per cent. Also, there was never a two-way market that would allow buyers to turn their certificates back into cash at any price.
Jolly, of Southend-on-Sea, admitted his sales staff lied to investors. In a statement to the Insolvency Service, he confessed: ‘Anglo’s salespeople told those they called that they were “bankers”, or were calling from a “bank”.’ Victims lost at least £1.02 million.
I warned in 2013 that Jolly’s company was falsely claiming that the then Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne had virtually guaranteed that carbon credits would show a profit within months.
It claimed a separate company listed on the Stock Exchange made a two-way market that provided investors with an exit strategy. But this was a lie as well. Jolly was also linked to Green Planet Investment. It was closed down by the High Court after investigators found it was using false claims to raise £14million, said to be for the development of a leisure resort in Brazil. The resort was never built.
More recently, I sounded the alarm when Jolly emerged as one of the backers of Privilege Wealth, a complex web of international companies that claims to offer big returns to investors by lending out their cash as payday loans.
Earlier this year, the boss of Privilege Wealth’s call centre in Panama, Christopher Burton, 45, from Nottingham, was shot and badly wounded in what police in the Central American country described as a targeted attack. Burton, who was working in Panama under a false name, was arrested in hospital at the request of Spanish police who are investigating him for alleged share fraud.
The British arm of Privilege Wealth is under scrutiny by Companies House after failing to file accounts legally due in April. Officials began moves last month to have the Hertfordshire-based business struck off. But they have discontinued the legal action while further enquiries are made.
Jolly is now believed to be in the Far East.