Bankers lose out in green collapse of Clean Energies
Dozens of wealthy City bankers have lost hundreds of thousands of pounds from the collapse of a green energy investment company.
Senior financiers at JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup were persuaded to invest in Clean Energies Investor by Gregor Shaw, previously one of the biggest sellers of the controversial Icebreaker tax-avoidance scheme.
Shaw, once famed for his Lamborghini lifestyle, co-founded Clean Energies in 2015 to invest in anaerobic digestion plants, which turn waste into electricity and are known for attracting generous environmental subsidies.
Panama Papers data indicates Shaw and his wife were 40% shareholders via a Seychelles trust. They used another firm they owned, an investment brokerage called Argentous, to persuade rich investors to fund Clean Energies through £6 million of high-yield bonds.
However, according to the Clean Energies administrators’ report, it collapsed this year under the weight of losses at troubled facilities in Slovenia. Shaw was declared bankrupt in January after a petition from HMRC.
The recent administrators’ report says they uncovered “significant discrepancies” in the accounts and talks of how some transactions appeared to be “materially mis-stated”, their real value “far lower” than claimed.
Ex-Citigroup banker Gareth Mitchell, who invested £250,000 in a three-year bond promising 10% annual interest, said: “I am not happy. It’s a sizeable amount of my pension.”
Another who invested £100,000 said Shaw was “a very good salesman. He had the gift of the gab”. Like Mitchell, he said he was not made aware that much of Clean Energies was in high-risk Slovenia.
Others in the creditors’ list include Henrik Gobel, capital markets head at Morgan Stanley, and current and former JPMorgan high-fliers James Glanville, Clive Ponsonby and Liv Loge. They had invested between £50,000 and £670,000.
Argentous and Shaw did not respond to calls for comment.
