Interesting piece here about Solar Cloth potential sale to ex director - our guess is Perry and ex backer, again our guess is the guy who put in the £500k, Charles Shale. As Crowdcube shareholders dont have any position here, they will most likely be shut out - the administrator's job being to rescue money for preferential creditors.
http://www.businessweekly.co.uk/news/cleantech/solar-cloth-company-set-sale-out-administration
All a little too obvious we think!
If Perry ends up buying the heavily discounted assets of solar cloth company, his behaviour will have clearly moved from seriously unethical to blatantly criminal (i.e. bankruptcy fraud). This whole saga should be stopped and I hope that investors take some action against him. His claims in his investment pitch were either exaggerated or pure fantasy (£65M order pipeline which never existed, claims of exclusive distribution agreements which didn't exist). If you layer on top of a prior poor track record in business (2x previous bankruptcies) a tendancy to lie and deceive people to take their money, and on top of that plain incompetence, you have a recipe for disaster. It's a real shame that Crowdcube failed in their due diligence to ensure that an accurate picture was portrayed of the business and the individual (if they had succeeded, surely the pitch should never have done live).
ReplyDeleteIt is particularly ironic that the explanation given for their bankruptcy is the government cut to feed-in-tariffs, when the thin-film products Solar Cloth worked with were never MCS accredited so would not have been eligible for FiTs in the first place (at least for smaller projects below 50kW).
The real explanation is a poor business plan combined with dishonesty and incompetence.
I hope that the administrators realise that selling assets to Perry or anyone else involved in the management of the company towards its demise presents big ethical and potential legal complications and they would be better off selling it to the investor who has already wasted so much of his cash on it - and maybe with a new team he can rescue something from the ashes.