I have been passed the entire contents of a Whatsapp group, the “TW Project”, which details how Paul Mathieson, a financier who has run four failed and fraudulent listed companies, paid £15,000 each to Nick Leeson, the rogue trader who brought down Barings Bank, and to Seth Freedman, who was employed by Harvey Weinstein to terrorise and silence the women he raped and journalists who tried to expose him.

Leeson and Freedman now run a company called Red Mist.

They promised to destroy me, in part, by using Bloomberg reporters to protect that fraud. The full WhatsApp group exchange started by Freedman in late October last year is below and in it you see how weaponising my mothers suicide, a proposed sting operation, and working closely with two Bloomberg reporters to spread defamatory smears were deliberate tactics. And you will see Leeson’s explicit threat, his desire, to kill me.

You will see how Mathieson’s PR man Zak Mir, also paid £15,000, was ordered to rope in other CEOs to this conspiracy, CEOs whose antics I have exposed as they have destroyed shareholder value or engaged in outright scams.

Bloomberg reporters were told they would be given these contacts to verify the smears they spread, with Mir naming names of those who might help, including Neill Ricketts founder of the £200 million Versarien fraud that I brought down and which has just gone bust. Its shareholders discussed having me killed too. It is a lovely world I live in.

Mir was taken out of action by his father’s illness and subsequent demise and so was very much a Good German, obeying orders, and only in the earlier stages of this plot. I find his actions in this plot reprehensible but he has apologised to me and will, I believe, assist the FCA and other agencies with their investigations.

Mathieson has made millions of pounds during the past 30 years floating the same company on four different stockmarkets.

The listings in his native Australia and in the US made Mathieson millions in salary and share sales but in the end the entities went bust with shareholders losing everything. He is a charming man.

The Whatsapp Group shows him talking of destroying other named individuals in the London market who he suspects of being my pals, how among those who have got in his way one was found dead with a bullet in his head and 10 are in jail, and also admitting to getting spoof share trades placed to artificially inflate the share price of his company.

Leeson knows a bit about trading and should know that this is illegal.

In December 2023 Mathieson listed his company, raising money at 80p a share on London’s junior AQSE Market. From the outset I exposed the company for telling lies, for its terrible financials, and its historic failures and, by the time its shares were suspended on November 25th 2025, never to trade again they were just 0.3p.

But Mathieson did not go down without a fight. He spent tens of thousands of pounds of money raised from investors to grow his AI come payday loans come bitcoin investment business, to hire social media promoters who would urge folks to buy the shares with untrue statements, supplied by Mathieson, without disclosing that they were being paid by Mathieson’s company. These promoters are named in the Whatsapp group chat.

But that could not counter my increasingly aggressive criticism here on ShareProphets and indeed Mathieson had received a legal letter from one of his own shareholders threatening to sue him for fraud (it is all in the WhatsApp group chat).

He asked his paid advisors how to deal with me. Most, to their credit, offered no way out.

But Zak Mir earned his £15,000 fee by introducing him to Freedman and Leeson who, he said, could help. By October 31 ProjectTW was born in a whatsapp group and for £15,000 each Freedman and Leeson promised to take me down and destroy me.

Step one of the plan saw Freedman liaise with Will Shaw, his friend, ‘main contact there’, and Bloomberg’s banking correspondent. He assisted with this plot when his Bloomberg colleague Meg Short was on holiday but it was Short who was the key and enthusiastic contact.

It is clear that Freedman was in constant contact with her, for instance, letting her know when Mathieson’s company, Amazing AI, would be announcing that it was issuing legal proceedings against me. On 20th November, the day Mathieson announced the proceedings, Meg had a long and pre-arranged conference call with Mathieson, Mir, Freedman and Leeson. Freedman gave her a dodgy dossier full of the most outlandish smears against me, smears that anyone with market knowledge or who had done a 20 minute search on Google could see were false.

In a phone call on 30th January, Short put those outlandish allegations to me, including the idea that I had burned down an entire block worth £40 million in the City to stop an FCA dawn raid on my offices 15 years ago, calling them ‘rumours’.

I explained why, with just a bit of work, she would have seen the ‘rumours’ could not be true and described the whole surreal call in a podcast here. I suggested that they had been supplied to her by one obvious lunatic. Little did I know.

But with names supplied to her by Freedman and Leeson and sourced by Mir, Short also called a number of PLC CEOs  to ask their views on the defamatory ‘rumours’ about me and also about City Bank Peel Hunt. Although she could not get enough to run a piece, the poison was spread.

But this was only the first part of the plan. Freedman wanted to entrap me and so Mir arranged for Mathieson to meet Howard White and Aleksandra Binkowska, who run Hydrogen Utopia (HUI), another firm about which I have been highly, and rightly, critical.

The plan was that they would approach me, with Freedman ensuring our conversation was taped, and offer me cash to go easy on them.

I would have said no and would, having taped the call, immediately have run an article saying that they had attempted to bribe me. I do not take bribes! But Freedman has form for releasing selected excepts from calls to mislead. He was sure he could get Bloomberg to buy into that.

White and Binkowska noted the way Mathieson weaponised my mother’s suicide (below) and refused to join the conspiracy.

Rosenblatts, the law firm Mathieson said he had engaged to sue me, were equally appalled and also walked away from him. Credit should be given to those who walked.

Freedman also suggested that Mathieson report me to the North Wales Police for harassment and showed him how to do so. This is a well played part of the fraudster’s playbook. Disgraced former star Julie Meyer tried the same line to shut me down even after she was sentenced to 6 months in jail for contempt of court and had to flee the country.

After liaising on timings with Bloomberg, it was agreed that Mathieson would publish a letter before action saying that he would sue me for £10 billion. That he did on 20 November, the day of the Bloomberg meeting, and Short was duly impressed.

Mir’s job was to find other companies that I had been beastly about (with reason) to copy and paste Mathieson’s letter and launch their own actions as well as talking to Short.

Mir says in the WhatsApp group that he thought Hamak Strategy (HAMA) on board but that appears to be its former chairman, since ‘resigned’, flying solo. The current team, led by the celebrated former fund manager “superwoman” Nicola Horlick, told Mathieson it wanted nothing to do with him.

In order to engage in psychological warfare against me Freedman suggested using the fact that my mum hanged herself when I was eight. This is no secret, I have discussed suicide, including hers and that of other family members, as an issue in a sober way many times. But on 24 November Mathieson duly tweeted that he wished she had killed herself earlier than she actually did.

In order to engage in psychological warfare against me Freedman suggested, as you can see, using the fact that my mum hanged herself when I was eight. Thus is no secret, I have discussed suicide, including hers and that of other family members, as an issue in a sober way many times. But on 25 November Mathieson duly tweeted that he wished she had killed herself earlier.

As you can see, the members of the TW Project joked about it and about how I reacted. This is the sort of psychological warfare that was also used to terrorise Weinstein’s rape victims.

But the City has some standards and Amazing AI’s advisor (Guild Advisory) resigned in disgust on the spot meaning the shares were suspended never to trade again. No other advisor would take Amazing on meaning that it had to delist so investors have lost everything. Mathieson said this was a voluntary delisting but the reality is that no advisor would act for him. He had no choice. Freedman’s strategy backfired massively.

You would have thought this might make Short and Bloomberg think twice – everyone else was distancing themselves from Mathieson and his paid advisors but instead the Bloomberg team ploughed on.

At one stage in the group chat, Freedman is asked if there is any danger that the Police might object.

Four years ago I exposed a £200 million fraud called Zoetic. Its shares were then 72p. Today, now known as Chill Brands, they are 0.5p. But a shareholder in Zoetic, a City financier called Alastair Cade, wanted to shut me up and engaged Freedman to do just that.

He menaced me, two of my writers on ShareProphets and, for some reason a PR girl who has nothing to do with my operation. I guess Seth was just missing his days on the Weinstein payroll going after innocent women.

There were phone calls from untraceable numbers, often at midnight, dozens in one day where the caller just hung up. Then a man with a strange accent (Seth later admitted it was him) called and urged me to run an exposé on Zoetic – but it had to go out that night.

He became more insistent. I refused, as I could not stand the story up, and had I run it as is, Zoetic could have sued me and my campaign of exposés would have ended.

When that ploy failed, Freedman rang me up, announced who he was and proceeded to serve up a stream of menaces. Unless I retired from writing at once, he was going to destroy me.

He was going to print allegations, in The Guardian he implied, and he did not care if they were defamatory. He would do it anyway as ‘he liked defaming people’.

‘Did I know that he used to be in the Israeli Army?’, he asked. He wanted to see me now and was only 15 minutes away from the house where I live with my young family.

Instead of backing down, I exposed him on a podcast revealing what he had done as you can see here. But I was frightened for my sake and for that of my family.

I reported this to the North Wales Police and a colleague, Pete Brailey, reported it to the Gloucester Police. North Wales led the ‘investigation’. Freedman jokes in the WhatApp group that he told the fuzz that he was a journalist and showed them a Guardian article that he had written years previously and that this was just standard journalist practice. It most certainly is not!

Had the Police, spent 10 minutes on Google, and checked Ronan Farrow’s Pulitzer Prize winning exposé of how Freedman harassed for Weinstein they would have seen that he used exactly the same Guardian line then!

They did not but according to Freedman, in the WhatsApp chat, the North Wales Police bought his clearly duff excuse and he had a good laugh with them about Weinstein.

Laughing about harassing rape victims: is that not a bit misogynistic? His stated conclusion is that my local Police are so incompetent that they will not protect me and so he and Leeson can act with impunity to fight for fraudster clients. Indeed he thinks he can use the clowns at North Wales Police to harass me!

I suppose Leeson’s claim that he wants to ‘bludgeon TW to death’ makes him think that he is also above the law. We shall see. I have discussed the matter with the Garda Siochana, for Leeson now lives in Galway, and they will now liaise with the North Wales force which means that in due course Leeson will be interviewed under caution.

Does any of this matter? It does.

The FCA knows that for London to thrive as a financial centre it must encourage a culture of whistleblowing, where employees, investors and customers can flag up when something is wrong. And, indeed, where journalists can report on it. I raise matters with the FCA, FRC, or other regulators at least once a week and the regulators like it and like me. I am not deterred by vile thugs like Freedman and Leeson so continued to expose the lies and fraud at Zoetic and Amazing AI despite what was thrown at me. And my work has been vindicated so many times.

But others will not be so bold. Some journalists will buckle and many whistleblowers will buckle too. The FCA knows this and that it is why I have contacted it and so know that it is exceptionally concerned about the activities of Red Mist, which claims to represent shareholders against fraudulent bosses but is quite clearly taking payments to actually protect fraud.

How many others have Leeson and Freedman silenced? How much additional crime has taken place as a result of that? Rather worryingly, Freedman claims in the WhatsApp group to have contacts at the FCA itself who assist him in his work.

It is not the only occasion when fraudsters have paid money to silence critics. Labour MP Liam Byrne was somehow roped into one such smear campaign, one organised by Christoper Steele, the man who produced Hillary Clinton’s fabricated Russia Trump dossier.

That plot I exposed HERE and so one wonders how many others people are taking money to protect fraudsters with harassment and dirty tricks against those who might expose them.

I will publish through the day correspondence with a number of regulators, the Police and with Bloomberg. For all of them this case has enormous implications. Now get a thermos flask of tea and start reading the TW Project WhatsApp group in all its horror.

→ Read the entire WhatsApp conversation