Guy Conroy, director of Brazilian teak plantation investment scam company Green IS Group, has been banned as a company director
Green IS Group was running an FSC-certified Ponzi scheme. Investors lost £9.2 million.
Guy Conroy, the director of Green IS Group and GIS Forestry Limited, has been banned as a company director for 11 years. The ban follows an investigation by the Insolvency Service into the sale of investment bonds.
REDD-Monitor wrote about Green IS Group in July 2020. The company offered investments in teak plantations in Brazil. With a minimum investment of £5,000 the company claimed that investors would “Earn a fixed return of 8% per annum.” Elsewhere the company claimed a return of “8% - 11% Fixed Rate.”
Needless to say, Green IS Group and GIS Forestry were running an investment scam.
The plantations in Brazil were run by a company called BR & UK Florestal EIRELI – EPP. This company’s plantations were certified in March 2018 by the Forest Stewardship Council as well managed.
Six months before getting the FSC certificate, Green IS was advertising its plantations as FSC-certified.
FSC’s mission is to “promote environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of the world's forests”. Yet FSC had managed to certify what was a Ponzi scheme.
And it turned out that BR & UK Florestal EIRELI — EPP wasn’t just running teak plantations. The company was also raising cattle for beef and milk production. And the company was involved in several law suits.
On 3 September 2021, FSC suspended the certificate. One year later, on 2 September 2022, FSC got round to terminating the certificate. But that didn’t stop Green IS Group from continuing to claim its operations in Brazil were FSC certified.
FSC did not reply to several emails from REDD-Monitor asking for further information about the suspension of Green IS Group’s certificate, and asking what action FSC was taking to prevent the company from using FSC’s logo.
The company’s Facebook page still features FSC’s logo.
“Slanderous and defamatory”
Following REDD-Monitor’s post about Green IS Group, Guy Conroy sent a response in which he wrote about his company’s “dissatisfaction with the defamatory title of the article”. He also wrote about “slanderous and defamatory points in the article” — without explaining which points were slanderous and defamatory, other than the title.
Conroy wrote that,
We are giving you the opportunity to correct your article or remove it until it is accurate prior to issuing any legal takedown notice.
I neither “corrected” nor removed the article. And Green IS Group did not send a legal takedown notice.
Banned
On 16 March 2022, the High Court in London ordered Green IS Group to be wound up.
In its progress report for 2022-23, the liquidator, FRP Advisory Trading Limited, wrote that it had received claims for more than £8.6 million. In the progress report for 2023-24, FRP Advisory Trading wrote that it had received claims for more than £9.2 million.
At least 250 people invested in Green IS Group and GIS Forestry. The largest claim against the companies in the liquidation process was for £636,000.
Several of the people who handed their money over to Green IS Group contacted REDD-Monitor following the post in July 2020.
One person (who didn’t invest, having researched the company and found REDD-Monitor’s post) reported the companies to the Financial Conduct Authority in August 2020.
FCA replied that they couldn’t take any action unless fraud had actually taken place. But by that time, many people had already lost money to Green IS Group. Had FCA acted, it could have prevented more people from losing money.
In a corporate video, Conroy actually tells the truth, for once, when he says that,
“First and foremost, the business is built as a commercial operation. We're are a business. We are here to make money.”
The company did not make money from its teak plantations in Brazil. The money came instead from investors. The Insolvency Service points out that Green IS Group and GIS Forestry misled people into believing that their investments were secured and that there were safeguards to protect their money.
In a statement released yesterday, Ann Oliver, Chief Investigator at the Insolvency Service, said:
“Green IS Group and GIS Forestry traded in a manner which was completely unacceptable and not in the public interest.
“Guy Conroy was a director of both these companies. He allowed them to mislead investors who lost out on millions of pounds as a result of his actions.
“Conroy’s conduct is not what we would expect of company directors which is why we have taken steps to remove him from the corporate arena until March 2036.”
I wonder now if it will be referred and taken by the serious fraud office so that matters can be taken further and find out where all the money was hidden away.
And, once again, the audit company - IMAFLORA, in this case - responsible for issuing a completely undeserved FSC certificate, and thus being partly responsible for misleading investors into thinking this was a legitimate company, gets away scot-free. Not even a rap on the knuckles from the FSC. IMAFLORA has issued 560 other FSC certificates currently listed as 'valid'. How many of these are also frauds?