BREAKING: One True View – the £30m City boiler room scam the FCA has still done nothing about, the end is nigh

I repeatedly warned folks about One True View and Appbox Media, two scams run by Mr Polat Hassan from a City boiler room which have snaffled c£30 million of investor cash. I alerted the FCA but, as you might expect, the floor shitters did nothing. So what news from One True View since it announced a £13 a share, £186 million, takeover back in late 2019.

As I revealed in December 2019 HERE, that was a spoof to keep the mug punters at bay. The bidder was an Irish company FinnTechMixer Ltd. Well sort of. I noted 14 months ago: 

The bid is an all share one from FinTechMixer an Irish company whose registered office is at Commerce House, 14 Washington Street, Cork, Ireland, T12 NCF2. As you can see HERE, that is just a mailing address. This company appears to have no website and no internet presence at all.

I have tracked it down via Ireland’s company’s house and it was established on January 9 2017. It has one director, a Portuguese national, Mr Joaquim Magro de Almeida and he owns all 100 shares in the company which have a fully paid up value of 100 Euro.  The company has filed just one set of accounts, for the year to June 30 2018 which are abridged as it is stated to be a dormant company. It has net assets of 100 Euro.

There have been no share issuances notified to Ireland’s company’s house since then only multiple changes of registered office as it hops around Eire. All are mailbox addresses. We can thus assume that this is a worthless shell and so while it can issue shares with a face value of £183 million the shares are in fact worth absolutely nothing.

Ends.

Since then there have been no regulatory filings and so no accounts from the Irish company. This is still a sham company. So how is the “advertising agency” One True View faring?

For most of last year it was “business as usual.” That business being the issue of new shares to mug punters, no doubt told by Polat’s salesman that there was a £13 a share bid on the way. Then on 29 September a “problemo” the auditors quit.  Actually they quit on July 22 but the document was not filed at Companies House until 29 September.  The document is a formal resignation letter from Ashcrofts in which it explains why it quit:

“management imposed limitations of scope. Requests for information and explanations have not been forthcoming and we have been unable to obtain sufficient, appropriate audit evidence to enable us to form an opinion.”

That is damning, especially as at that point the last balance sheet investors had seen was at 8 March 2017.  But fear not, on October 14 2020 we saw accounts for the period to 31 January 2018 and the year to 31 January 2019! Two for the price of one. A new 8 person accountancy firm signed off on these two works of pure fiction.

Let’s just deal with the more recent: 2019. The really great news is at the front. 

“In January 2020, the company commissioned a report into its cutting edge marketing software by Paul Taylor and Carl Weiss of Alytor Digital Asset Ventures. It concluded that “the company is the fourth largest social media travel based brand and in 2019 consolidated this with over 600 million impressions. This was based on supplied social media metrics. The report settles on an “effective cost per mile” methodology and indicative value of £32,692,664.  The directors have based their own valuation on this report”

Feck me that sounds good. That sounds really good. All those page impressions, this must be a real cash cow then? Er…no.

Sales in 2019 were zero. As in 2018. And thus the company reported a pre-tax loss of £2.19 million. Oh dear. Actually it is worse than that since the company spent c£1.8 million of developing its software and capitalised all those costs. So the cashburn from operations was just under £4.2 million. Luckily in that financial year mug punters invested £3.62 million in new shares but it seems that the supply of marks may have slowed done dramatically since then.

The directors marked up the value of intangible assets (that software worth £32 million) from £3.7 million to a shade under £5 million but the rest of the balance sheet at the year-end was ugly. Cash was zero, net current liabilities were £742,482 and net tangible assets were MINUS £741,096.  Clearly, with no indication of any income as Polat Hassan signed off the report on August 5, the position must have been even worse at that point.

No wonder the new auditors flagged up that they could not validate the carrying value of the intangibles and also made it clear that there was a “material uncertainty regarding the ability of the entity to continue to adopt the going concern basis of accounting.” In fact the auditors stressed it was not only a “material uncertainty” but also a “real uncertainty”

I should say so. No bid. No revenues. And it seems that the supply of mug punters is drying up.

Then the management changes came thick and fast. In come Otvnom Ltd as a director on 21 October. That would be the same day that Otvnom itself was established at Companies house with issued share capital of £1.  Its sole owner is Amanda Jane Hussey born 1966 who soon also joined the board.  Then out went Polat Hassan and his entity Start Up Nominees.

Finally that old trick of the fraudsters, shortening the year-end by a day, from 31 January to 30 January. That was announced on 2 November 2020 and buys an extra 3 months. But still, as of this month, the accounts are overdue. I suggest that they will not be very good, that there is more chance of me shagging Cheryl Cole than there is of that £186 million bid occurring, that One True View is out of cash and is worthless. In the end frauds always run out of other people’s money.

It is only a matter of when that is admitted to and also how far away Polat Hassan has got with his filthy lucre if the FCA or other authorities try, belatedly, to do anything about it. That the FCA failed to act against Hassan’s boiler room despite all my warnings is yet another mark of shame for the floor shitters.