Welcome to another week at Inside Timeshare, we start this week with news of two claims companies ordered into liquidation by the High Court in Manchester, Meredith Pritchard Claims Consultants Ltd (MPCC) and First Law Solutions Ltd (FLS).
On the 22 February 2019, District Judge Obodai, wound-up both companies in the public interest, an official receiver has been appointed. All public enquiries concerning the affairs of the company should be made to: The Official Receiver, Public Interest Unit, 2 Floor, 3 Piccadilly Place, London Road, Manchester, M1 3BN. Email: piu.north@insolvency.gsi.gov.uk
Meredith Pritchard was no stranger to many enquiries made to Inside Timeshare, we did publish an article in March 2017 with a full account of one readers experience. Unfortunately this article was removed after the director Stephen Paul Fairclough made threats to our reader for submitting his story for publication.
Stephen Faircloughs company, Meredith Pritchard, along with FLS, was in the business of supposedly making claims against timeshare companies and offering relinquishment services. He scammed many people out of thousands of pounds for legal fees, with the promise that they would be passed to various lawyers in Spain, Malta and various other countries, to pursue litigation through the courts.
As it now turns out, this was never the case as investigations found out, lawyers may have been instructed, but no evidence of any of the work for the services being carried out was ever found.
MPCC received £440,000 while FLS was paid £110,000, with investigators being unable to find any evidence of any payments being made to any overseas lawyers. Although they did find that FLS had only paid £13,000 to any lawyer and this was during the investigation.
The grounds of the petitions presented by The Insolvency Service, were that both companies “traded with a lack of commercial probity by failing to provide contracted services in a timely manner or at all. This included accepting payments in respect of non-viable claims, charging excessive fees, and using misleading and aggressive sales techniques”.
We can well believe the last part of that sentence due to the comments given by our readers at the time, plus the fact that Stephen Fairclough did threaten one correspondent.
Another factor to the petition was that both MPCC and FLS “It was also alleged that MPCC and FLS did not maintain, preserve and/or deliver up full accounting records and that they were remiss in complying with statutory obligations to file annual accounts and confirmation statements”.
It was also noted that MPCC did not fully cooperate with the investigation. Knowing the nature of Stephen Fairclough, that is not surprising.
To see the full press release from The Insolvency Service click on the link below.
Although these companies have now been wound-up, it is believed that there is an investigation underway against Stephen Fairclough, let us hope that this leads to his arrest and conviction.
Again, this story shows just how careful you have to be when dealing with any company that has contacted you or that you have found on the internet or advert in any publication.
If you need any help in checking whether any company is genuine and actually does what it says, then use our contact page and we will point you in the right direction.
The post Start the Week: Two Claims Companies Closed Down appeared first on Inside Timeshare.