Tony Hetherington is Financial Mail on Sunday’s ace investigator, fighting readers corners, revealing the truth that lies behind closed doors and winning victories for those who have been left out-of-pocket. Find out how to contact him below.
WE’RE WATCHING YOU
What could possibly be worse than discovering that the trusted top salesman at a multi-million pound gold investment company is using an alias and has a dodgy past? Well, how about the fact that the owner of the same firm also uses an alias and has a dodgy past!
Two weeks ago, I revealed that salesman Clive Lindsay, of Solomon Global Limited, is really Clive Mongelard, whose record as an investment scammer dates back over a decade. He is banned by the Financial Conduct Authority from working for any firm it regulates.
Two days after The Mail on Sunday’s report appeared, Solomon Global’s managing director Paul Williams wrote: ‘Thank you for bringing the issues surrounding Clive Lindsay to our attention through your article.
‘We take these matters seriously, and as a result we have terminated Clive’s employment.’ So far, so good. But a closer look into Solomon Global, which sells gold coins as investments and had a turnover last year of almost £14 million, found surprisingly little at first about the background of its shadowy owner, Scott Wilson.
Company records show that last January he acquired a more than 50 per cent stake in the business, and Solomon Global told Companies House that while he was not a director himself, he had the power to appoint or dismiss directors to run the business for him. Since then, Wilson has boosted his stake to 75 per cent or more.
All that glitters: Solomon Global boss Scott Wilson is actually Scott Assemakis
He describes himself as a ‘business consultant specialising in marketing and sales’, but his LinkedIn page does not include a photograph and mentions only a spell as a self-employed salesman at an art gallery.
From 2014 to 2022 he claims vaguely to have worked in financial services, but does not name a single employer, let alone any directorships or controlling shareholdings.
And this is not surprising, since I can now reveal that Scott Wilson is actually Scott Assemakis.
Under his real name, he recently had an 11-year ban on acting as a director of any company lifted.
The restriction came in 2013, after he played a leading role in what the Insolvency Service described as a ‘£7million land-banking scam’.
Using a variety of business names including Ultraclass, Burnhill Land Investments, and The Property Partnership, Assemakis and his crew sold plots of vastly overpriced land with false claims about its development potential.
One investor paid £10,000 for a strip of land near Towcester in Northamptonshire, only to find that the council had already banned building even a fence on it, and its real value was about £75.
Investigators from the Insolvency Service found Assemakis had pocketed over £1.3 million from the scam, while millions more vanished without trace.
When the ban began in 2013, Assemakis had to stand down as a director of another of his investment companies, European Fine Wines Limited.
It marketed wines at well above the prices charged by legitimate wine merchants and went into liquidation soon after he quit. Creditors claimed £3.4 million.
They received just 1.4p for every pound they were owed.Another one-time director at European Fine Wines was Emrah Ceyhan. And until last January, when he handed over to Scott Assemakis, he was the behind-the-scenes boss of Solomon Global.
Both Williams and Assemakis were invited to comment, but neither did so.
However, with the owner of Solomon Global and its leading salesman both feeling the need to use aliases because of past offences – which have left investors nursing big losses – it is not surprising that the Advertising Standards Authority banned the company’s recent promotion for making misleading claims.
It would perhaps be foolish to expect anything less.
Bailiffs after me for an error that wasn’t mine
C.S. writes: I am being pursued by Direct Collection Bailiffs Ltd for alleged unpaid parking charges imposed by Britannia Parking, but this is entirely due to an error made by the parking firm itself.
Tony Hetherington replies: You told me that you and your wife paid for parking at Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast, in a car park controlled by the local authority. However, the cafe there was full, so you drove to the nearby car park at North Landing, wrongly believing it was also run by the local council. Later that day, you left the car park, but drove back to let your disabled wife use the public toilets there before returning home.
Costly: The Flamborough Head car park on the Yorkshire coast is controlled by the local authority
You realised your error when Britannia Parking, the company behind the North Landing car park, contacted you. But to your shock, you received two Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs), not one. Each was for £100, reduced to £60 if you paid quickly and without appealing. You paid the first £60 PCN but appealed against the second.
This is where things went badly wrong, because Britannia attached your appeal to the first PCN, which you had paid. Confusingly, it cut the second penalty to £20, which you also paid. Even worse, it passed the first PCN to debt collectors and the sum rocketed to £170.
I contacted both Britannia and its debt collectors. The latter quickly told me that Britannia had asked them to cease further action. Britannia itself admitted it had made an ‘administrative error’ with your appeal. It explained that it counted each separate entry into the car park as a new visit, with a new fee – even though the original charge covered you for both.
Britannia has withdrawn all demands against you, but refuses to offer any comment or explanation, saying it ‘cannot comment on individual cases’, despite the fact that it held your signed authority to discuss its mistakes with me.
If you believe you are the victim of financial wrongdoing, write to Tony Hetherington at Financial Mail, 9 Derry Street, London W8 5HY or email tony.hetherington@mailonsunday.co.uk. Because of the high volume of enquiries, personal replies cannot be given. Please send only copies of original documents, which we regret cannot be returned.
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