Wine firm that’s now gone under ... THREE times
B.R. writes: We are victims of Winebuyers. I met Ben Revell at a wine fair and fell for his scheme. My company sent a consignment of wine. We know Winebuyers sold some of our wine, but it has not paid us.
Numerous calls and emails went unanswered, and Winebuyers even deducted charges from our credit card for months despite the cancellation of our contract.
MOST phoenix companies rise from the ashes just once, but there seems to be almost no limit to the number of times wine dealer Ben Revell can write off a company, start again, and then leave fresh wreckage behind him. I warned last September: ‘Beware of the Zombie’. At the time, Revell was running the same business for the third time under different company names – and now it has collapsed too. When he first set out as an online wine trader, Revell formed Winebuyers Ltd. He charged wine producers and merchants to appear on his winebuyers.com website, and he promoted sales of their wine to the public. Shoppers would pay Revell’s company, and most received their wine, but increasingly the producers and merchants complained they were left unpaid.
Winebuyers Ltd went into liquidation in 2021 with debts of around £1.5million. Just as it failed, a new company was registered, called Winebuyers Group Ltd. It bought some of the failed company’s assets, including its customer records and website. To much of the outside world, nothing had gone wrong as the website was still there. On paper, the new company had a new boss, Kyle Fordham, but behind the scenes the strings were pulled by Revell who described himself as Chief Executive.
Once Winebuyers Group was up and running, Fordham quit and has not been heard of since in the wine trade. Revell officially took over as director in March last year, and in June, I reported there were unpaid court judgments, that it had failed to file accounts legally due, and that consumer websites were packed with complaints.
By July, the company had fallen into administration, blaming Covid, Brexit, the cost of living, a shortage of glass due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and, of course, climate change. What happened next was farcical. The Administrators of the collapsed Winebuyers Group sold some of its assets, including its customer database and website, to a new company called Elysian Ventures Ltd, which offered £100,000. Elysian was set up by Revell, who then signed it over to an odd offshore company called Ophidian Corp, based in the Seychelles, where its ownership is concealed.
Again, to outsiders looking at the Winebuyers website, it was business as usual – until a few weeks ago, that is. Last month, Revell quit as director and the website stopped working. Elysian Ventures has now gone into Receivership. This latest collapse is because Elysian handed over only half of the £100,000 it was supposed to pay to the Administrators of Winebuyers Group.
The Administrators – from the major insolvency firm Begbies Traynor – have issued a scathing report, saying that when Elysian Ventures failed to pay up, they demanded the return of the Winebuyers website and everything else covered by the purchase agreement. Elysian replied that it was unable to access the IT system operating its own website. Begbies Traynor then hired outside IT experts, but say Elysian provided ‘just enough information to give the appearance of cooperation without enabling us to move matters forward’.
A report on the conduct of Winebuyers Group and its directors has been submitted to the Department for Business. Begbies Traynor adds cryptically it is in touch with the Department ‘to provide such further information as they may require to support their own continued investigations’.
The bottom line to all this is that it shows how just one person can control three successive companies, all of which collapse with big debts, while at the same time he uses just one business name: Winebuyers. However you look at it, our company oversight system just doesn’t work.
Ben Revell could not be contacted for comment. If he gets in touch, I shall be glad to report it.