BREAKING: The strange world of Julie "Lingerie on Expenses" Meyer, Lattun Limited & the £3m robbery

Up until recently, the sole director of UK registered Lattun Limited was Dr Rene Eichenberger. But after his falling out with Julie “Lingerie on Expenses” Meyer, the great Member of the British Empire has had to come out of the shadows and again act as director. And guess what, this is a Julie Meyer company that has made a profit in one year at least. Yes, of course it is just accounting jiggery pokery. Lattun is another worthless black hole which used to be known as Entrepreneur Country. It gets worse. Far worse as I expose below.

First to the financials for Julie’s conference business. The last accounts are for calendar 2019 and were filed on October 6 2020 as micro accounts. They show:

In short, the business appears to be losing money, is almost certainly burning cash, almost certainly has sod all cash and is only surviving by not paying its bills. For followers of Ms Meyer, this is a familiar tale. And so too is the booking of profits that are not really profits and that brings me to the 2018 accounts, once again signed off by Mr Eichenberger but which have all the hallmarks of a Julie Meyer special.

For in 2018, Lattun reported a profit of £2,901,330. Okay there was an operating loss of £243,632 but it would be the bottom line which La Meyer would be shouting about. So what is going on? Turn to Note 8 which explains all.

Lattun was Entrepreneur Country and Julie’s Viva capital, then known as Pelion Partners, bought it on August 16 2018 from the ACE Fund managed by Julie. Viva (then known as Pelion) bought Ariadne Capital Group (in Malta) on July 18 2018 and concluded that the £3.114,962 owed by ECL/Lattun to Ariadne was not recoverable and would have to be written off. That explains the exceptional “profit” and almost eliminated the company’s negative net assets.

But there are a couple of problems here. The first is ownership. The 2016 accounts for Ariadne Capital in London, Julie’s flagship company, show that it too made a big profit that year, just under £3 million. It was on the basis of that profit and net assets of £3.858688 million that Lingerie on Expenses was actively seeking new investors in late 2017 as the business went into administration. So how did Ariadne book such a profit? Simple. It sold Entrepreneur Country to Julie’s ACE Fund. The only problem was that the fund did not pay. It has never paid which is why the administrator discovered that the realisable sum from those £7,154,390 reported assets as at December 21 2016 was in fact….nil. Zero. And Andrew Duncan has still not managed to realise a cent.

So if the fund did not actually pay for ECL, did it really own it? How was it in a position to sell it back to Viva Capital? This, I suggest, is the sort of thing that the ongoing FCA enquiry into Ms Meyer is considering.

There is another matter…the sums owed to Ariadne Capital Group in Malta. How were they owed to Ariadne Capital Group, a business incorporated in Malta on 23 August 2016? If, for instance, you check the calendar 2015 accounts for Entrepreneur Country, you will see that it had current creditors at that point of just over £2 million and it is made explicitly clear that “Ariadne capital Limited will continue to support EntrepreneurCountry Global Limited”. In other words, it was the London entity ponying up to support ECL’s losses so nearly all of that £3 million Ariadne Malta is writing off is cash ponied up by Ariadne London with its diverse shareholder base. So when exactly did Ariadne London (a diverse shareholder base not just Julie Meyer) transfer ownership of this asset (sums owed by ECL)  to Ariadne Malta (owned by Julie Meyer) and for what consideration? The 2016 Ariadne accounts show an increase in debtors from £3.183 million to £7.132 million. That increase largely reflects cash owed by the fund but it is hard to see how the, by then, £3 million owed by ECL could have disappeared. So when did Ariadne London transfer ownership to Ariadne Malta and for how much?

All of this is classic Julie Meyer smoke and mirrors.