Wound up company owes me approx £12k of stock.

[tillyfunk]

Hi All,

 

A few years ago I purchased approximately 10k if investment wine. The portfolio has done pretty well and is now worth at least £12k. The problem is, I went to contact the broker the other day to look into selling it all up and he has disappeared along with the wine. A little search shows he there was an insolvency winding up order 5th Feb 2016 and he's not answering any calls or messages. He's changed his surname on social media and hasn't been active in some time.

 

Depressingly he was an old friend.

 

I'm sure I can find him if I try hard enough but is there anything I can do once I track him down? If he wound up the company with that stock as assets, surely he has acted fraudulently? Could the same be said if he sold the stock in an attempt to bail out the company prior to the winding up order? If so, I would like to pursue that avenue. The family has money and would likely bail him out if threatened with a criminal offence.

 

Any help, advice and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks.

[unclebulgaria67]

I might be wrong, but i thought you actually bought wine and it was stored away somewhere. There might be storage fees payable, which the broker is not paying.

 

Do you have a copy of the original terms and conditions for this investment ? What does it say about security of your investment ?

 

If the business was would up, there should be details of the person or company that dealt with the insolvency. You need to contact them for more information.

[unclebulgaria67]

There is info online about such issues. Some are genuine investments with wine bought and others are just a con. If it is the latter, then it needs to be reported.

 

http://www.decanter.com/wine-news/fca-warning-wine-investment-scams-305251/

[steampowered]

When a company is wound up, its assets are used to pay creditors.

 

Did you have a set of written terms and conditions with a 'retention of title' clause stating that you owned the wine? If not, he owned the wine - and you were just an unsecured creditor.

 

If you were just an unsecured creditor, there is unlikely to be anything you can do.

 

However if you could prove that he simply transferred the wine to himself, then you could go after him.

 

The first step is to have a look on the companies house website (https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/) to see what happened. Consider contacting the insolvency practitioner if one was appointed.

[BazzaS]

Whilst there are charlatans out there (the site auto-censors the word that starts with sca, and rhymes with ham!), let us assume your (ex-?)friend had a legitimate business that just didn't succeed.

 

2 'leading cases' (where the law has dealt with such issues, to give an answer) spring to mind, and hinge on if you were buying actual individual (& identifable!) bottles of wine that were then held for you, or "10 bottles of the stock of 200 that we hold as an investment".

 

Re Goldcorp Exchange Ltd

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re_Goldcorp_Exchange_Limited_(in_receivership):_Kensington_v_LiggettRe

and

 

London Wine Company (Shippers) Ltd

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re_London_Wine_Co_(Shippers)_Ltd

 

In summary, if there were specific (identifiable) bottles that were being bought and held for you:

(So, bottle 21 is yours, a fine Mouton Cadet 19-blah-blah, and bottle 76, a 19-whatever vintage champagne, and so on),

then a 'trust' was established, the bottles being held in trust for you, and you could claim them.

As others have noted, there may be storage fees unpaid that you'd need to pay (or some or all of the bottles may have had their ownership taken over to pay the storage fees).

 

If however, you were buying an interest in "a collection of wine held as an investment" (so, "there is a stock of 200 bottles, and you are buying 10 of them, 5% of the total"), and your 10 are never individually identified, then no trust is created (due to lack of 'certainty of subject', of the trust), and there is no consequent breach of a trust, only breach of contract, where (as the business is insolvent) you'll get back less than you put in, and potentially little or nothing.

[tillyfunk]

BazzaS,

 

I don't have individual numbers for the bottles, but it certainly is my understanding that I own specific bottles and that is what the invoices say.

 

I certainly think he was honourable at the start but the business came undone.

 

As for storage, I was storing them under his account so there was no fees, but this is also where the problem lies.

 

I have contacted the liquidator, they want a week or so to look into it. Depending on what they come back with I may have to look at some professional advice.

 

Thanks for the links and taking the time to reply everyone.

 

Peter

[robmiller667]

Did the liquidator offer any insight? Once companies go into liquidation, you typically find yourself in a queue of creditors - the liquidator report should indicate if there are other creditors.