Teak plantation investment scam company Green IS Group is now in liquidation. Will the police take action against the scammers?

The liquidator has received claims for £8.6 million from “investors” in the scam.

PHOTO Credit: The Big Lie, Green IS Group

Green IS is a network of companies registered in the UK that advertised “Ethical and sustainable forestry investment”. One of the companies in the network, Green IS Group claimed to be running teak plantations in Brazil. The company offered retail investors the opportunity of investing in the trees in its plantations. For £10,000 you could buy either 300 saplings to be planted in Brazil, or 150 nine-year-old teak trees.

In 2020, Green IS Ventures Limited, another company in the network, put out a brochure promising 7.5% annual interest, which would be paid quarterly.

Green IS Group managed to get the plantations in Brazil certified as well managed under the Forest Stewardship Council system. The company then used the FSC logo on a series of investment websites, lending an air of legitimacy to the scam.

FSC suspended the certificate on 3 September 2021. In April 2022, Green IS Group still claimed to be an “FSC Certified Company” on its website. FSC eventually terminated the certificate on 2 September 2022.

REDD-Monitor wrote about this investment scam in July 2020:

Following FSC’s suspension of the certificate, I wrote to FSC three times to ask them why the certificate was suspended. FSC did not reply, probably because they are embarrassed about having certified a Ponzi scheme.

On 4 April 2022, I asked FSC the following questions:

[A]re you aware that the Green IS Group still claims to be FSC certified on its website? Have you contacted the Green IS Group since the certificate was suspended (seven months ago) to make sure that they remove the FSC logo from their website? And if not, why not?

FSC did not reply.

Even today, on its Facebook page, Green IS Group still uses the FSC logo, more than one year after the certificate was terminated:

The fact that Green IS Group used the FSC logo on its investment websites without prior approval from the certifying body, in this case the Brazilian organisation Imaflora, is in breach of FSC’s rules. This was raised in auditing reports as a non-conformity. This was corrected when Green IS Group added the following words to its website: “FSC is not responsible for and does not endorse any financial advertisement for investment returns.”

In effect, FSC allowed the continued use of its logo to provide legitimacy to an investment scam.

“Slanderous and defamatory points”

Following the post on REDD-Monitor, Guy Conroy, CEO of Green IS Group sent an email asking me “to rectify the slanderous and defamatory points in the article”. However, he did not explain which points were slanderous and defamatory (apart from the headline).

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.

No “legal takedown notice” arrived, no doubt because Green IS Group was, er, running a Ponzi scheme.

In his email to REDD-Monitor, Conroy referred to the FSC certification, and explained that,

We are a timber export company and by exporting containers of our own timber every month from our own mills and plantations in Brazil, we use the income from these exports to service all our investor returns and have successfully done so for over 5 years.

But an FSC audit report dated May 2021 states that “The organization has not yet carried out harvesting activities and, according to information from the manager, there is no forecast for harvesting.”

By 2020, interest payments to investors were delayed or not made at all. Green IS Group made a series of excuses — blaming the Covid-19 pandemic, for example.

Liquidation

Green IS Group Limited, is now in liquidation following an order for winding up in the High Court in London on 16 March 2022.

The most recent report from the liquidator, FRP Advisory Trading Limited, covers the period 23 May 2022 to 22 May 2023. FRP Advisory Trading writes that it has met (online) with Guy Conroy, Daniel Scott-Drysdale, and Cheryl Williams, who were directors of Green IS Group companies.

However, they “have not managed to make contact with Gary Williamson (director between January 2018 and June 2019)”.

Which is a pity.

Here are some screenshots taken in May 2022 from Williamson’s (sadly since deleted) Instagram account:

I think it’s safe to say that Williamson is leading a lavish lifestyle.

Inconsistent information

The liquidator, FRP Advisory Trading, writes, that,

The information provided by the directors that we have met is inconsistent and does not readily tie back to the limited records of the cases. The explanations provided by the directors vary over time. The directors intimate that the corporate structure and fund raising mechanisms were sophisticated, yet they are not able to set out (as an example) the commercial rationale for the Group structure and why funding rounds were undertaken by different entities.

We are aware that certain investors were told that GIS owned plantations in Brazil and their capital plus interest payments were secured by an all assets debenture over GIS that the security trustee held on trust. We have latterly been advised that a Brazilian entity, BrazilCo, owns the plantations. We have not been able to review that BrazilCo does own any property.

The company that was FSC-certified was called BR & UK Florestal EIRELI - EPP. There is no mention of BrazilCo in the FSC audit reports.

It is possible that BrazilCo owned other plantations that were not FSC certified. Which would make Green IS Group’s claim on its website to be an “FSC Certified Company” even more misleading.

FRP Advisory Trading continues:

The explanations provided by directors as to how the investment schemes operated contradict documentation provided to the investors and statutory information at Companies House. For example the investor pack and accounts filed at Companies House state that BrazilCo (the alleged entity that owned and operated the Brazilian teak plantation and production facility) was a 100% subsidiary of Green IS Group Limited. Guy Conroy now alleges that BrazilCo is owned by him (50%), Gary Williamson (25%) and a Brazilian national [Cleilton Leite] (25%). Given the high level of returns promised to investors, and the large commissions paid to the “sales teams” that found the investors, the directors were unable to explain how BrazilCo was going to justify paying such substantial sums back to the Companies and why funds couldn’t legitimately be raised more cheaply.

The “Companies” refers to Green IS Group and GIS Forestry Limited, both of which are in liquidation. BrazilCo is not mentioned in Green IS Group’s sales brochures.

Conroy declines to visit Brazil

The liquidators have been unable to contact anyone in Brazil. Conroy told them that “relations have broken down”. Conroy said he would need to visit the sites in Brazil personally “to re-establish relations and generate the value from the sites and the teak planted on it”.

Conroy was, according to FRP Advisory Trading, initially “enthusiastic to attend”. However, he ultimately refused to go to Brazil. He told the liquidators that there’s “nothing in it for him”.

This comment reveals a great deal about Conroy. The proposed trip to Brazil was not supposed to be for his benefit. The purpose of the trip was for Conroy to sell whatever property his company owns in Brazil and raise some money to pay back to the victims of his investment scam.

The liquidators even told Conroy they could arrange a “contingent management fee or other realisation fee for monies repatriated to the UK from Brazil, which would clearly make it worth Guy Conroy’s while if assets existed in Brazil.”

Conroy told them he would raise funds for the trip by selling a property he owned, but the liquidators write that, “he has now advised that he is unable to fund the trip”.

The liquidators have not been able to locate the exact sites of BrazilCo’s plantations. Company records refer to large areas in Brazil, but without specific addresses. The email address they were given for Cleilton Leite does not work.

The directors claim that there are assets in Brazil including a wood mill, teak plantations, plant and equipment. “We have not received sufficient evidence that these assets exist,” the liquidators write.

We have a number of documents that refer to a plantation however the value paid are not in the region of the amounts raised in capital from shareholders. There are a number of invoices for export of goods and for the purchase of wood but these are not on the scale that you would expect for an operation that was returning up to 10% per annum to shareholders with investments in the millions of pounds.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s nothing much to be found belonging to Green IS Group in Brazil.

Recovery room scammers target victims

Investors have been targeted again by scammers who claim that for an upfront fee, they would be able to recover their money.

This is stage two of the scam — the recovery room scam.

When scammers succeed in persuading people to invest in a scam, they write down the details of their victims. These “sucker lists” include names, addresses, phone number and background information about the person scammed. They are sold between different investment scammers.

When an investment scam is exposed, or fizzles out because the scammers have blown the money on fast cars, big houses, and expensive watches, restaurants, hotels, and clothes, the scammers still have one more thing they can sell. That’s the “sucker list”. And of course they can sell it more than once.

FRP Advisory Trading appears unaware of the existence of “sucker lists” — which is concerning, given that they are dealing with a boiler room investment scam based on exploiting sucker lists.

The liquidator writes that,

Since our appointment we have been made aware by a number of investors that third parties have approached them stating that their funds can be recovered for a fee. These third parties appear to have been impersonating legitimate companies and were using personal information to look credible. It is still uncertain how or where third parties obtained bondholders’ credentials.

FRP Advisory Trading has so far received claims for more than £8.6 million - and that is before making a call for claims. “On the basis of current information”, they write, “there will not be sufficient funds available to pay a distribution to unsecured creditors.”

If you are a victim of Green IS Group, please contact Action Fraud. The more complaints that Action Fraud receives, the more likely it is that Green IS Group will be investigated.