Axiom Legal Financing Fund
After OffshoreAlert exposed Axiom Legal Financing Fund in August 2012, the litigation funding-based investment scam quickly collapsed and 12 British attorneys were later struck off, including the scheme's principal, Timothy Schools, who misappropriated most of the approximately £100 million that was raised from investors. In 2020, Schools, David Kennedy, and Richard Emmett were criminally charged with fraud by the United Kingdom's Serious Fraud Office. The year before, another Axiom principal, David Rae, pleaded guilty to money laundering in the U.S. regarding an unrelated scheme that he participated in after Axiom went bust. A special shout out to David McIntosh QC, a former president of the Law Society of England and Wales who represented Schools in a libel complaint against OffshoreAlert's editor, threatened to sue a London hotel if we mentioned his client's scam at a conference we were holding there, and - without a hint of irony - questioned OffshoreAlert’s “integrity”, all on behalf of a person that even cursory due diligence would have shown to be a crook. It's also worth mentioning that London’s Metropolitan Police issued OffshoreAlert's publisher with an ‘harassment warning’ and threatened him with arrest after Schools' adult daughter, Lisa Schools, who was “Senior Administrator/Office Manager" of two firms that participated in the fraud, including one that received more than £50 million, made false allegations against him. Given that Timothy Schools is a former policeman, it was difficult not to believe that the notoriously corrupt Met was simply doing him a favor.