£5,000 wine deal Down Under has left a bad taste
B.L. writes: In 2007 I purchased investment wines from Australian Portfolio Wines UK Limited, for £4,703. In 2011, the company indicated my holding was worth about £5,000 and I asked for the wine to be sold. In 2012, I repeated the instruction to sell. The company replied with a bill for £163 for storage for the whole amount despite having already sold part of my holding, which had not been declared to me. With storage charges, I would soon be owing money, so in 2013 I again requested that the entire holding be sold. In 2014, I wrote again and telephoned, but my calls were not returned. AUSTRALIAN Portfolio Wines has changed its name to APW Asset Management Limited, but it is still at the same London address and appears to be still in business.
I asked what the problem was in selling your wine, if it had risen in value. And I questioned what had happened to the wine that was not mentioned on the storage bill. Had APW managed to sell it?
Damien Dawson, the company’s head of operations, told me an email had been sent in 2012, requesting permission to pass your details to an unnamed third party, but he claims he received no reply. An offer was received in 2013 for your bottles of Two Hands Ares Shiraz.
Dawson told me: ‘Although funds for the sale of Mr L’s wines have not been received, APW Asset Manage- ment is looking to send payment to Mr L for the full balance to finalise his account.’ You have told me that what you actually received was a cheque for £1,107, so despite the valuation showing a profit, you actually lost more than 75 per cent of your investment. Worse, when you banked it, the cheque was returned unpaid. It took more than a month for APW to issue a good cheque.
Although APW is a British com- pany based in London, its sole director when I first made contact was Enzo Giannotta. He used to be a salesman at a scam investment company called The Wine Index Limited which was ordered to be wound up by the High Court in 2003.
Giannotta’s replacement is Chima Maduabuchukwu, who describes himself as a management consultant living in the Bahamas.
I pressed Dawson for details of his boss’s experience as a wine trader and I asked how much control he has over the business while he lives thousands of miles away.
I also told Damien Dawson that I had found that one of the owners of APW is an Australian ‘wine consultant’ named Adam Dawson, who was behind a business Down Under that also called itself Australian Portfolio Wines.
And one of the people involved in setting up the Australian company was Spencer Pibworth, whose role in telemarketing scams goes back at least a quarter of a century.
He is a professional wallet-thinner who has sold dud shares, whisky and champagne through firms in Gibraltar, the Netherlands and Britain.
Dawson offered no comment on any of this, but I received an email said to be from ‘Chima Madu’.
He said he did not have time to respond to ‘a smear campaign to discredit us’, but he blamed you for your losses because, he claimed, you had demanded an urgent sale.
All in all, this wine business leaves a bad taste.