Wine scam director receives 11-year ban

The director of a fraudulent wine investment firm, Capital Bordeaux Investments (CBI), has been banned from running a company for 11 years after conning at least 10 people out of £60,000.

The company falsely claimed to have been operating since 1995, despite the fact that its director would only have been six years old

Scott Elliot Andrews, 26, was the sole director of the London-based company that targeted the victims of other fine wine investment scams, promising to help them recover their losses.

The investigation into the company found that at least 10 members of the public paid a total of £59,750 to invest in bottles of fine wine that never even existed.

CBI’s accounts with a government bonded warehouse company showed no deposits of wine were made, and its financial records showed that it never even purchased investors’ wines.

Andrews was also found to have misled the public by claiming that Capital Bordeaux Investments had been advising clients since 1995. This is despite the fact that the company was only founded in April 2012, and that in 1995 Andrews was just six years old.

The firm, which purportedly traded from plush offices on Lombard Street in the City of London, was shut down by the court last year in the public interest.

Andrews received his disqualification, which was announced today, on 19 August 2015, preventing him from running a company until 2026.

Commenting on the case, Paul Titherington, official receiver in the Public Interest Unit, which investigates companies that are forced into liquidation, said that Andrews showed a “blatant disregard for commercial morality”.

He said that Andrews should have expected to be banned from running any limited company “for a lengthy period time.”Andrews refused to provide adequate accounting records, meaning that he could also be hiding further assets from the authorities.