Insolvency & Law Scam In Trouble

Insolvency & Law Scam In Trouble.

We have just received information from a credible source that the Insolvency & Law Ltd bank account has been frozen by Co-Operative Bank. The bank took action in early October and the account is still frozen which suggests that this is not related to one transaction and a more serious investigation is underway, possibly by one of the UK enforcement authorities such as the FCA, Insolvency Service or Police.

This also explains the flurry of activity we have seen in the last few weeks related to Insolvency & Law Ltd, Peter Murray, Robert Dene Smith and Britena Clarke as they try to keep the scam alive. In this article we will be looking at three areas of interest.

1. RECENT ACTIVITIES

10^th October 2023 – Robert Dene Smith incorporated a new UK company called I&L ADVISORY LTD – Link to Companies House. Robert Dene Smith is a long-term associate of Peter Murray having first been a director with him in 2007 in a company called MANDATE GROUP LTD. Ever since, Robert Dene Smith has been popping up in Peter Murray companies as and when required, including two stints in INSOLVENCY & LAW LTD. He is currently a director of Insolvency & Law Ltd alongside Peter Murray. Robert Dene Smith’s role is marketing, IT & websites. We therefore assume that Mr Smith is responsible for the fake awards that have been exhibited on the Insolvency & Law website for the past 7 years and have now been removed since we exposed them. During his term as a director of Insolvency & Law Ltd he will be equally responsible with Peter Murray for the unlawful activities of operating an unauthorised claims management company. Now is time that we look more closely at Robert Dene Smith and his role in the scam.

16^th October 2023 – Peter Murray transferred all of his shares in INSOLVENCY & LAW LTD to Robert Dene Smith – Link to Companies House Filings. This suggests that the freezing of the Insolvency & Law bank account may be linked to an investigation into Peter Murray personally. There can only be two reasons why Peter Murray would transfer shares in Insolvency & Law. One would be to give the appearance of removing himself from a position of control in an attempt to persuade the bank to unfreeze the account or allow Robert Dene Smith to open an account at a new bank, although the reality would be that Peter Murray is still controlling the company in the background. The other would be to an attempt to dispose of assets should he be prosecuted, although this share transfer could be very easily challenged and reversed by the authorities.

On or around 16th October 2023 Peter Murray left the UK and went to Africa. We have reason to believe he went to Nigeria and may still be there because he was in a time zone which is one hour ahead of GMT and he has a Nigerian business partner who describes himself as a ‘Wealth and Asset Manager’. We’d be interested to know if Nigerian money is flowing into Peter Murray enterprises in the UK. Rightly or wrongly, Nigerian money always sets off money-laundering alarms. Alternatively it is possible that his Nigerian ‘Wealth and Asset Manager’ partner may have helped Mr Murray establish a bank account in the country.

1^st November 2023 – Britena Clarke incorporated a new UK company called I&L RECOVERIES LTD – Link to Companies House. Britena Clarke is Peter Murray’s assistant in Insolvency & Law Ltd. This would appear to be another attempt to open a bank account so that Insolvency & Law Ltd can take in money using a I&L Recoveries Ltd bank account. If, as we suspect, the UK authorities have frozen the Insolvency & Law bank account because of suspected criminality, both Britena Clarke and Robert Dene Smith would be persons of interest to the authorities and even more so if they assisted Peter Murray in continuing to take money from new victims using their bank accounts. Britena Clarke’s dishonesty has already been exposed in previous articles because she has admitted lying in a witness statement that she provided to a court. I&L RECOVERIES LTD has already published a new website – LINK HERE which looks remarkably similar to the Insolvency & Law website. When one scam is coming to an end another one rises from the ashes. This further suggests that Peter Murray is not expecting Insolvency & Law Ltd to survive. At least we can be thankful there are no false claims of recoveries or fake awards on Britena Clarke’s website. It’s worth noting that Britena Clarke lists herself as a Jamaican citizen. She has virtually no assets in the UK so can shoot off back to Jamaica should she be investigated in the future.

Insolvency & Law Scam In Trouble. In summary, Peter Murray has disposed of his shares in Insolvency & Law Ltd. He fled the country to Africa and may still be there. The Insolvency & Law bank account is frozen and we don’t know why. Two of Peter Murray’s main accomplices have both formed new companies with “I&L” in the company names.

2. PETER MURRAY COMPANIES – BOUNCE-BACK LOANS

To date we have uncovered 10 Peter Murray companies which applied for, and received, the maximum bounce-back loan amounts of £50,000 per company. That totals £500,000 in loans under-written by the UK Government. It is not illegal for a director of multiple companies to apply for bounce-back loans for every company, but there were strict rules on eligibility and the use of those loan funds.

One of the rules for obtaining a bounce-back loan was that a company needed to have a turnover of 4 times the size of the loan, or needed to confirm that it would achieve that turnover. There are several companies which did not meet that criteria and had no likelihood of meeting it. There is now a lot of focus on bounce-back loan fraud in the UK. The companies which obtained the loans were:

INSOLVENCY & LAW LTD;

UK COMPANY REVIEW LTD;

JESTINA MEDIA LTD;

MONEY MATTERS LTD;

POLISHED AND POISED LTD;

3PAY LTD;

3PAY GROUP LTD;

INTELICRED LTD;

NEXT LEVEL HOMECARE SERVICES LTD;

SELF MADE PJM LTD.

At the time the loan applications were made Peter Murray was a director of all of these companies. We will look at them more closely in our next article because some of these companies changed their names countless times. We’re particularly interested in the relationship and money flows of 3PAY LTD, 3PAY GROUP LTD and INSOLVENCY & LAW LTD, but we’ll give a taster of a couple of the other companies.

POLISHED AND POISED LTD is a company which originally had a young man named ZAYNE MURRAY as a director. He left and was replaced by PETER MURRAY. The company has a very nice website which can be seen on this LINK. The company obtained a £50,000 bounce-back loan despite not having the required turnover of £200,000 at the time. What we struggle to understand about this company and its website is how it could ever expect to achieve a turnover of £200,000 per year. This “ultimate beauty and wellbeing experience” as it describes itself is located in a back garden of a house in North London. What makes it more unusual is that the company doesn’t want prospective customers to know where it is ! It’s a secret and the company wants to keep it like that ! We’ve never heard of a genuine massage parlour behaving in this way. The website states that would-be customers have to book and pay for services in advance before they will be told where the beauty salon actually is ! How many people are really going to do that ? It’s almost as if the company is a front for a money-laundering operation because it is just very odd. We found out that the massage parlour is at 43 Flexmere Road, London, N17 7AU so no point in keeping it a secret now.

NEXT LEVEL HOMECARE SERVICES LTD obtained a bounce-back loan for £50,000. It did not have the required turnover level of £200,000. Its accounts filed at Companies House make pretty dismal reading. It has never had more than 2 employees and it’s last accounts state that the number of employees in both 2021 and 2022 was NIL. The company is eight months overdue on filing its Confirmation Statement. Companies House attempted to dissolve the company which would have meant that the bounce-back loan would not have been paid back and the UK government would have had to compensate the bank for the £50,000 loan, but somebody has raised an objection. That may well be the Insolvency Service which has responsibility for investigating bounce-back loan fraud. Peter Murray was a director of NEXT LEVEL HOMECARE SERVICES LTD when the bounce-back loan was taken out, as was a lady of similar age to Peter Murray called DONNA MURRAY. A younger man called DARIUS PETER MURRAY became Marketing Director after Peter Murray resigned and remains a director of the company, even though for the past two years the company has declared it has no employees.

3. COUNSEL OPINIONS

Peter Murray likes to tell his intended investor victims that he has “obtained counsel opinion” on the merits of a group action claim and the opinion is positive. That is how he persuades investors to pay upfront fees to Insolvency & Law. He sometimes refers to having obtained “Kings Counsel opinion”. It’s been very noticeable that he never gives the name of this counsel or provides a copy of the opinion to investors where the counsel is identified. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want the investors to know and we have always found this very odd.

We decided to look for barristers with links to Peter Murray / Insolvency & Law Ltd. We found one. We expected it to be just a case of Insolvency & Law Ltd using a barrister, but it turned out to be more than that. In November 2014, Peter Murray and Timothy George Christie Becker incorporated a new UK company called MURBECK LAW LLP – Link to Companies House. Timothy Becker was a barrister at the time and is now a Kings Counsel. The company was dissolved two and a half years later in May 2017.

In 2019, the National Crime Agency (which is the highest level of the UK Police and deals with the most serious international crimes involving very large sums of money), announced the outcome of an eight year investigation into suspected worldwide money-laundering. One of those under NCA investigation was the barrister, Timothy Becker.

The NCA announcement states:  “As part of the investigation the NCA uncovered an international money laundering network that saw hundreds of millions of pounds transferred through more than 100 bank accounts held globally including in the UK, Russia, Hong Kong, and Switzerland”……..

“The High Court endorsed consent orders agreed by the NCA with Mrs Nuttall, barrister Timothy Becker, 55, from London, and a developer. Between them, the three individuals held some of the proceeds of crime including the £100k Bentley Mulsanne, which was registered to Timothy Becker”.

It should be pointed out that Timothy Becker and the other two suspects agreed to voluntarily hand over £6m of assets in an out of court settlement with the NCA in order to avoid charges. The penalty was paid and Mr Becker had to give up his Bentley motor car. As a result no charges were filed against the suspects and therefore Mr Becker was not subject to any disciplinary action by The Bar Standards Board, the regulatory body for barristers. He was free to continue his career as a Kings Counsel with no mention of the investigation or the out-of-court settlement on his record.

Whilst the investigation was in progress Peter Murray was spending a year travelling the world visiting a great many countries. He claims the year-long trip was to celebrate his 50^th birthday and who are we to doubt his word. It would be very interesting to know whether Mr Murray opened any bank accounts in the countries he visited.

The NCA report on the investigation can be found on this LINK.

We hope the KC opinions which were used to support Mr Murray’s demands for upfront payments from victims of failed investment schemes were not given by Timothy Becker. There is no evidence to suggest that they were because I&L is not willing to divulge the name of the KC. If they were given by Mr Becker this would obviously be a major cause of concern for investors because of the prior business relationship between Mr Becker and Mr Murray. It would cast doubt on whether the opinion was honest or was it one old friend doing a favour for another.

We note the opinions were not given to a solicitor representing investors or to investors themselves. They were given to Insolvency & Law Ltd which means that the KC who gave them will be able to claim that he/she has no liability to investors or any other third party. The liability is just to its client Insolvency & Law Ltd.  One thing is for certain. Peter Murray is not going to take any action against a former business colleague.

In the dishonest Witness Statement provided to the court by Britena Clarke she writes that the witness statement was prepared with the assistance of a direct-access barrister. She doesn’t say who that was which makes us wonder.

This is our fifth article covering the Insolvency & Law Scam. The fourth in the series can be viewed on this LINK.

By our reckoning Insolvency & Law Ltd should be holding more than £400,000 of money in its account. It owes £180,000 to one investor who is currently involved in a legal dispute and  approximately £200,000 of HSG investors’ money. We haven’t counted the £129,000 in blackmail money obtained by Peter Murray from a company he targeted (see previous articles). We would all love to know if the money is in that frozen account or if it had already been transferred beyond the reach of creditors. We think the account will have been emptied not long after the payments were made into it.

The people involved in the Insolvency & Law Ltd claims management activities were Peter John Murray, Robert Dene Smith, Britena Clarke, Marcia Abbott, Gill Clow and Sara Martin.

Insolvency & Law Scam In Trouble. Insolvency & Law Scam In Trouble.