EverGreen Solutions’ Christmas tree investment scam

Why couldn't the City of London Police see that this was a ridiculously obvious scam?

Eight years ago, I wrote about a company called EverGreen Solutions.

The company planted Christmas trees and offered retail investors the opportunity to invest in tree seedlings and claimed that this investment would, after a few years, grow into a significant profit. EverGreen Solutions promised they would look after the trees and subsequently sell them.

If you spent £3,000 on 250 trees, after four years, according to EverGreen Solutions’ glossy brochure, you would earn a 25% return. After eight years, you could expect 133.30%. And that was just the Buy Back Guarantee.

EverGreen Solutions aimed to achieve a return of 58.7% after four years, and and eye-watering 300% after eight years.

But as I wrote in 2015, “Unfortunately by then, EverGreen will be long gone, with the investors’ money.”

I pointed out that the company was only registered in November 2013, and as such had no record of successful investments.

The company’s website was far from reassuring, and the shops selling EverGreen’s Christmas trees looked like they came from an episode of Only Fools and Horses:

The Boiler Rooms

To make matters significantly worse, a series of boiler room operations were cold calling retail investors to persuade them to invest in EverGreen Solutions’ Christmas trees: Axis Capital Services (which the Financial Conduct Authority had warned about twice); Heathbury Trading; Zeno (or Zing) Consultancy, Wade and Vere (which appeared briefly on REDD-Monitor in April 2014); and Castle Corporate Services (which was linked with Renwick Haddow’s Capital Alternatives scam network of companies).

In September 2014, as if it wasn’t already ridiculously obvious that this was a scam, Action Fraud, “the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud”, put out a warning about investment in Christmas trees. Action Fraud was concerned that the same tactics were being used in other investment frauds: “cold calling, high pressure sales, promise of high returns etc”.

And the cherry on the cake was that one of the companies back in 2015 offering Christmas trees as an investment (along with carbon credits), was a company called Gemmax Solutions:

Gemmax Solutions was offering the same species of Christmas tree as EverGreen Solutions, and was using the same supplier, Yorkshire Christmas Trees Limited.

Gemmax Solutions was part of Paul Seakens network of scam companies that sold carbon offsets to retail investors via a series of boiler room operations. In 2021, Seakens was jailed for 13 years. His sidekick Luke Ryan was jailed for six years.

The company’s response

Scott Levy, the director of Evergreen Solutions invited me to visit one of the company’s Christmas tree sites. “I really hope you are quick to arrange a visit to see me, as you are quick enough to post this absolute nonsense!” Levy wrote.

I didn’t visit any the company’s Christmas tree plantations. For the simple reason that the visit would have revealed nothing except a field full of very small Christmas trees.

Levy could not have proved to me that he had only sold any particular Christmas tree to only one investor. He could not have proved to me that his company would still be around after the tree had grown for four years. And while I’m sure he had an explanation for the series of boiler room operations that were cold calling retail investors to persuade them to hand over their money, that would have remained one red flag among many.

The City of London Police “investigation”

On 14 October 2015, I was surprised to receive an email from Scott Levy. He attached two letters from the City of London Police.

The first letter was dated 25 August 2015, and was addressed to one of EverGreen Solutions’ victims, who had made a report to Action Fraud.

The City of London Police had conducted an investigation into EverGreen Solutions as a result of several fraud reports it had received.

The City of London Police stated that its investigation had identified the following:

• Evergreen Solutions Ltd is the company responsible for selling Christmas tree investments for the parent company Evergreen Farming and Forestry Ltd.

• It is evident that a number of brokerage companies have also been involved in the sale of Christmas tree Investment for Evergreen Solutions Ltd.

• The City of London Police had located and inspected land rented by Evergreen Farming and Forestry Ltd in a number of locations throughout the United Kingdom. We can confirm that a product does exist namely in excess of one hundred thousand Christmas tree saplings all of which have been individually tagged. These Farms are not connected in any way to Evergreen Farming and Forestry Ltd; they merely rent the land for the purpose of growing Christmas trees.

• The City of London Police have spoken to these farmers and established details of the rental agreements and contracts that have been made between them and Evergreen Farming and Forestry Ltd.

• We have also interviewed the Christmas tree farmer that has been contracted to prepare the land, plant the saplings and cultivate the trees in those locations. This farmer attends to the trees as and when necessary and charges Evergreen Farming and Forestry Ltd for his services. The farmer has assured the police that the trees are being cultivated to the best standards that he can provide.

• In addition to these findings an expert in Christmas trees has been consulted. This expert has reported some concerns regarding the projected growth rate and percentage of crop loss forecast by Evergreen Solutions Ltd. Despite these concerns his report could not be considered conclusive.

In summary the expert indicates that at least one further year of growth on top of what was forecast by Evergreen Solutions Ltd would be required to reach the minimum required height, meaning that at least six years of investment was needed as opposed to five.

The offices of Evergreen Farming and Forestry Ltd have been visited and the Director and other connected persons have been interviewed. These interviews have not assisted in providing evidence of any criminality.

Due to these findings the City of London Police have been unable to uncover any evidence that would support any criminal charges.

As such the intention of the City of London Police at this time is to close this matter with no further action.

The second letter was dated 15 September 2015 and was addressed to Levy. It stated that,

This letter is to inform you that at this time the City of London Police investigation into Evergreen Solutions/ Evergreen Farming & Forestry Ltd has been closed, therefore at this time the City of London Police has no intention of taking further action against you in relation to this case.

The letter explained further that

There is potentially property that needs to be returned to you so I would ask that you contact me on the telephone number below as soon possible [sic] after receiving this letter so that we can arrange this.

Uh oh. It looked an awful lot like I’d goofed. If the City of London Police with all of its resources couldn’t see evidence for a scam, how could I possibly claim that Evergreen Solutions was running an investment scam?

But the City of London Police seems to have focussed its investigation on the Christmas tree side of things. Sure, there were Christmas trees growing in fields that the City of London Police had visited.

But that really isn’t the point of these tree planting scams. Trees planted in a field do not prove that Evergreen Solutions wasn’t running an investment scam.

The questions that the City of London Police apparently did not address include:

• Why did Evergreen Solutions hire boiler room operations to sell its investments?

• Why was Evergreen Solutions’ office a virtual office that could be hired by the day?

• If the investments were so sure, why didn’t Evergreen Solutions just invest the money themselves, sell the trees themselves and take 100% of the profits after four years, or (even better) after eight years?

The unravelling

Evergreen Solutions’ story started to unravel in December 2017. PlymouthLive reported Malcolm Harrison, who runs an accounting firm called MH Associates, as saying that Scott Levy had “apparently gone missing”.

Harrison was acting on behalf of several clients who had lost “substantial sums of money”. Apparently Evergreen Solutions defaulted on rental payments that were due in 2015.

PlymouthLive writes that,

As a result, the farming contractor had stopped maintaining the trees on behalf of Evergreen in autumn 2015.

The landowners have since legally reclaimed ownership of the land, including any trees planted there.

If only the City of London Police had stayed on the case just a few weeks longer.

A year later, on 24 December 2018, The Telegraph reported that,

It is feared that more than 100 people who bought 277,000 seedlings for Nordmann fir non-drop Christmas trees in 2014 and 2015 may have lost investments totalling more than £3m.

EverGreen Farming and Forestry Ltd, the company running the scam, was dissolved in August 2018. Exactly as I predicted in 2015, the company disappeared before paying anyone.

The Telegraph reported that Richard Turner had invested £6,000 in December 2014. “It seemed like a reasonable idea,” he told The Telegraph.

“Someone has to back these schemes and you get your profits at the end. The trees cost me £12 each and the firm said they would be sold for anything from £18 to £28 each and I’d get a good slice of that. That was a more than reasonable payback.

“I rang up a couple of years later to get an update from the company and there was no response. Then I discovered it had closed down. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do.”

Action Fraud told The Telegraph that it had received a complaint but could not find “any lead that would result in a successful criminal investigation”.

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