Privilege Wealth

Privilege Wealth’s “low-risk, high-return” investment scheme swindled more than £40 million from investors, who were offered “insured” annual returns of 12% that would purportedly come from investment in payday loans offered by the Sioux Tribe in the USA. After OffshoreAlert revealed in October 2016 that it was a scam masterminded by Spain-based British fraudster and disqualified company director Brett Jolly, new investment fell by 85% from £494,000 to £76,000 per month, according to the company itself in a libel action that it filed against OffshoreAlert's publisher at the High Court in London, which he did not defend because foreign libel judgments are unenforceable in the U.S. under the SPEECH Act, which was introduced in 2010 to combat Britain's crime-friendly defamation laws. Demonstrating why the Act was needed in the first place, British judge Richard Davison, a.k.a. "Master Davison", stated in his default judgment that Privilege Wealth’s scheme "is far from being a fraud” and that he needed to issue “a substantial award, both to compensate the claimant and to provide a public marker that the allegations were untrue” to deter existing investors from requesting “early redemption” and, presumably, new investors from investing. We hope that no-one listened to Davison's nonsense but it became moot a mere 22 days later when Privilege Wealth’s scheme was suspended after the head of its Panama call center was shot and wounded in what Davison might have described as “far from being an attempt to kill”. Given the crude nature of Privilege Wealth’s fraud and that it was targeting British pensioners, Davison’s comments were particularly reckless and irresponsible. A special mention also to one of the English lawyers who represented Privilege Wealth in its libel action … Jonathan Coad, a self-described “committed Christian” who, nevertheless, took on a client that was in breach of at least two of the 'Ten Commandments'. Divine justice was done, however, when Privilege Wealth apparently didn't pay its legal fees, causing Coad's employer, law firm Lewis Silkin, to make a claim for £45,000 when Privilege Wealth went into administration.