WE’RE WATCHING YOU
A CONVICTED fraudster who ran a scam wine investment company has now been banned from acting as the director of any limited company for the next 11 years. Anthony Collins, who was previously known as Kyrone Collins, ran Dow and Jones Limited from March 2016 to March 2020.
His sales staff made false claims about the potential profits to be made by investing in their wines, and investigators from the Government-run Insolvency Service reported: ‘ Wine sold to investors was often at around a 100 per cent mark-up from recommended retail prices, meaning profitable returns on investments at the level and timeframe advertised by Dow and Jones would not be possible.’
Collins filed inaccurate accounts with Companies House, making his business look healthier than it was, and leading one investor to part with £111,450 which has disappeared. A total of £809,143 is owed to investors who paid for wine which Dow and Jones failed to purchase for them.
I warned against Dow and Jones in April 2017, when it was charging £ 10,200 for a mixed set of nine bottles of wine called the Duclot Collection, which I found could be bought from a genuine wine merchant for about £5,500. Collins, 32, was convicted in 2011 of swindling the NHS out of thousands of pounds by submitting false invoices that were rubber stamped by a pal working in a hospital. He was given a suspended prison sentence and then worked as a salesman for an earlier dishonest wine investment business, Prime Trading 5 Limited, before setting up Dow and Jones. He is now banned until 2032 from setting up or controlling any limited company.