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Greg Lance – Watkins
Greg_L-W
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is what gives the remaining 10% a bad name!
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Arron Banks with some of his many business and political
interests © FT Montage
JUNE 30, 2017 by: Cynthia O’Murchu and Henry
Mance
On the first anniversary of Britain’s vote to leave the EU, Nigel Farage put on his Union Jack shoes to attend a party at a stately home near Bristol. The owner of the house, Old Down Manor, is Arron Banks, a 51-year-old insurance entrepreneur who has emerged as Britain’s most prominent political donor, claiming that he invested nearly £9m in the run-up to the Brexit vote.
His guests drank champagne and cheered a replay of the television coverage of referendum night.
One Ukipper called him “King Arron”, while copies of his book The Bad Boys of Brexit were laid at each table setting. Mr Banks has promised to continue to shake up British politics, but a year after the vote, the extent of his wealth and his political intentions is unclear.
Even Old Down Manor is not all that might seem. It is not Mr Banks’ home; he runs it as a wedding venue, living in a modest farmhouse nearby. Old Down Manor Ltd, the holding company, had net liabilities in the most recent set of annual accounts available.
Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage celebrates Arron Bank’s £1m donation to the party in October 2014 © Getty
In 2015, Mr Banks told the FT that he was worth around £100m. This year he appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List for the first time, with an estimated net worth of £250m — much of it riding on the then expected planned flotation of Eldon, one of his insurance companies. But public filings covering Mr Banks’ business interests show the use of a range of accounting techniques that mask the value of his investments.
He is a shareholder in at least 20 UK registered companies according to Orbis, a company database. Almost all of their parent companies are offshore in the Isle of Man, Gibraltar and the British Virgin Islands, affording them privacy.
His interests worldwide include insurance, banking, diamond mining and political consultancy. “I started my business with a desk and two phones, and built it from nothing. I earned and created every penny I made,” he said earlier this year.
Mr Banks built Group Direct, a motor insurer, from a small office above a bakery in Thornbury, Gloucestershire. In 2008, this business reversed into Brightside Group, which was listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market.
Mr. Banks and his wife say they made £10m from selling their shares in Brightside. He left in 2012, after a quarrel with his cofounders and two years after that, the company was sold to AnaCap, the private equity group, and became heavily lossmaking.
AnaCap has since sued its auditors, alleging “serious and widespread” failings at Brightside, including during Mr Banks’ tenure, though he is not a target of the suit.
In 2010 and 2011, Brightside paid Southern Rock Insurance — the Gibraltarbased underwriter in which Mr Banks is a major shareholder — £17m for a software platform and £32.4m for rights to distribute and sell motor insurance. But despite these sales, Southern Rock lost nearly £9m that year and by 2011 it was technically insolvent, without enough reserves to cover potential payouts.
The Gibraltar financial regulator ordered its directors to recapitalise the company. In the following years Mr Banks and his co-shareholders pumped money into Southern Rock and accepted a “period of ban or self-exclusion from other insurance directorships”. Mr Banks resigned as director of Eldon Insurance in Sept 2013 and Southern Rock in 2014.
Business remained difficult. Between 2010 and 2015, Southern Rock made multimillion losses on its core business in four of the six years.
In 2015, the most recent accounts available, Southern Rock posted a loss of nearly £28m on its core business. But it turned an overall profit by selling policy renewal rights for £73m to ICS Risk Solutions, an Isle of Man company that is majority owned by Mr Banks.
This allowed Southern Rock to book upfront profits from future earnings. I started my business with a desk and two phones, and built it from nothing. I earned and created every penny I made Mr Banks told the FT that Southern Rock was a “profitable, sustainable business in good standing” and that its finances could not easily be compared with other underwriting businesses because it also sold financial products.
Southern Rock had sold policy rights in order to meet solvency rules, he added. In the UK, Mr Banks’ insurance group’s main businesses — Eldon Insurance and Rock Services — work closely with Southern Rock, as extensive related-party disclosures show.
A page from Rock Services Ltd’s 2015 accounts showing ‘related party’ disclosures Eldon operates the motor insurance brand GoSkippy, and prominently advertises on the website of Leave.EU, Mr Banks’ pro- Brexit campaign group.
The company’s profitability is difficult to assess because of its high administrative expenses, which closely track turnover.
In 2015, it achieved a profit of just £284,000 on a turnover of £33.6m while paying £33.4m in administrative expenses. It received a £3,000 UK tax credit.
A page from Eldon’s 2015 accounts.
The company’s profitability is difficult to assess because of its high administrative expenses, which closely track turnover In the same year, it sold £25.7m of services to Southern Rock Insurance in Gibraltar and bought £27.5m of services from Rock Services, a UK company, of which Mr Banks is a director.
Through his lawyers, Mr Banks said a £250m valuation of Eldon Insurance was “speculative”, but that it could be justified because Eldon’s earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation were forecast internally to rise to £20m.
He also said that there were no plans to float Eldon Insurance Services, although he subsequently told the FT that a flotation could take place “maybe next year”.
The FT has contacted Mr Banks’ holding companies in the Isle of Man, to obtain its annual accounts, but had not had a response at the time of publication.
Mr Banks has diversified his holdings. Over the years he built stakes in an offshore bank, a provider of trustees to high net worth individuals, and — through Southern Rock Insurance — even uranium mining in Niger.
More recently, he has taken shares in a sports consultancy. His charity, Love Saves the Day, claims to provide grants in the Commonwealth including Lesotho and Belize. Established in 2014, and registered with the Charity Commission in June 2014, its most recent accounts — which cover the period to May 2016 — show no income received and no grants made.
One of the charity’s founding trustees was suspended in March this year by the UK’s solicitor regulation authority for one year, for in effect facilitating money laundering into Belize by a third party. “When it was brought to our attention she was being investigated in the UK we stopped using her”, a spokesman for Mr Banks said, adding that Mr Banks made a lot of donations personally outside of the charity “depending on the request”.
Arron Banks provided money to Leave.EU in the form of a £6m loan, he says to avoid inheritance tax © AFP
It is also unclear how much Mr Banks actually spent on Brexit. He provided money to Leave.EU in the form a £6m loan — he says to avoid inheritance tax. Leave.EU’s first annual accounts, show that as of September 2016 that loan — which is due to be repaid at the end of this year — was still outstanding.
Meanwhile his Better for the Country Ltd — which donated nearly £2m to Grassroots Out — another Brexit campaign group — is owed £1.3m by related parties, and owes £2m to related parties.
This article has been amended to show that Eldon Insurance received a tax credit in 2015.
This article was sent to me as a .pdf – From The FT
There would seem to be many anomalies regarding Banks’ accounts, as have been shown repeatedly on this web site, as you will have noticed.
I am also interested in any information that anyone can supply regarding the financial background etc. of Robert William Parks who would seem to be an accountant or book keeper of some sort.
Also the actual ownership of:
53, Elysten St., Chelsea.
Any properties assetts and corporate info & banking data of:
Thorn In The Side Ltd.
SEEMINGLY involved in the purchase/ownership of properties in:
St. Troupe (or nearby)
& Tuscany.
With regard to property it would be of value to have the correct address & lease details of the property in Washington that it was announced Banks had leased for his and Farage’s use. Which of Banks’ companies actually pay the bills or are they paid from elsewhere! It would also be interesting to know if the FBI/CIA/NSA investigation had something to do with their now infrequent, if ever, visits to Washington. I gather the inquiries are largely concluded with interestintg material leading to the study of connections and relationships, hence the delay in any action!
How Julian Assange received the memory stick which it is understood contained private eMails of Hillary Clinton, and if that was the memory stick who obtained it and was it in fact supplied by Russian sources and who delivered it to him!
There is also interest in a Russian named Mogleivitch and if or what connections he may have with Banks, his Russian wife and/or Nigel Farage.
Similarly the connection with the art collector, yacht & commercial plane owner Dimitry Rybolovlev a Russian olygarch living in Monaco. His meeting(s) with members of Donald Trump’s team particularly in Dubrovnic are also of some interest
On that subject details of the relationship between Jarred Kushner, Dubrovnic & Rybolovlev would be of help.
Finally at this stage it would be of interest to know the details of the plea bargain of George Cottrell (see: https://ukip-vs-eukip.com/2017/06/07/george-cottrell-may-have-cut-a-deal-that-might-not-suit-nigel-farage/) we believe that the information he supplied MUST have been consequential as they saved him from 20 years in an American prison!
You may wish to consider also further details regarding the apparently parlous finances of Arron (sometimes Aron) Fraser Andrew BANKS – something of a roundup to 28-Feb-2017 CLICK HERE also see HERE & HERE
If you have any information on these issues it would be appreciated and will be treated as from confidential sources, for your safety, but as with all information I publish it will require provenance.
Many thanks to the veritable army of individuals and media who have supplied me with so much material, particularly as I would wish to ensure that BreXit was of British making and not in any way financed or puppet mastered by Putin, Russia or corruption – some of those involved and their associations with Ukip, Farage, Banks, Batten and the very dubious behaviour of both the Metropolitan and West Midlands Police would seem to leave much to be desired as far as I can so far ascertain!
Ukip-vs-EUkip 