Member Info for ManoleteCustomer

This guy is an engineer and his business turned over at least £20M in 2015. It was a proper substantial business providing a service over a global marketplace by the looks of it.

The IP essentially was / is White and he can do it again.

The guy is 62 and he built the above business which for some reason failed but he’s not going to roll over, and he’s not living in a caravan anywhere. He’ll be living very comfortably in a manner that can’t be touched by any creditors.

This type of guy is not going to fold in the face of Manoletes bullying and he’s going to push back which is what he did.

Part of the problem is that Manolete and the average small cap domestic shareholder doesn’t understand the mentality of this type of guy that builds this type of business over several global territories. That lack of understanding is why Manolete will go the way of Manolete.

In the final showdown, the bull did Manolete so much damage it killed him.

You’re seeing that play out here in slow motion.

Paragraph 19 of the judgement on page 7 of the PDF

They haven’t been able to recover

£ 996,014.22

Oops..

So much again for their “rigorous checks” they had to go after his pension - and failed.

You have to understand that just because costs spiral and a lot more businesses go under doesn’t mean directors have done anything wrong.

And even if they have done something wrong, if they pay themselves salary and not dividends then there’s nothing to go at.

Given that there isn’t much tax advantage now in dividends over PAYE, many directories aren’t doing the former, ergo, there is nothing to see here from a Mano.l perspective.

The “business” is on the off ramp.

You are joking right? Amicable court case pursued at cost by a spare legal team?

No way. Barclays will run enormous interference and they really won’t want to pay.

Nuts. Barclays will finish them.

@ Tommy

I was on this board 2 years ago, but didn’t comment!

When you think about how these cases play out you have to look at how they operate and how that gels with each potential target demographic.

This is the first page of their opener:

https://imgur.com/a/CgEm8fV

First as you can see, they reference the £20M facility, and that’s it’s with HSBC. They also say it’s “long term” which obviously it isn’t.

This seems like an old school sales tactic. Firstly, sell the value (or scary figure), and because no one’s heard of Manolete (they could be incontinence pad manufacturers), so they say HSBC, and they need to land “price conditioning” so they land £20M.

I think it’s intended to read to the average punter that HSBC are coming at you for £20M.

That fools the low end chumps, but it’s not the case and it doesn’t wash with anyone higher level.

When I first got that letter I thought that this bunch of chumps don’t have any money because they need an overdraft and literally everywhere talks about Settlement. It’s everywhere. And that means that the can’t afford to litigate. And they can’t. If more than a very small minority of cases pushed back then they’d run out of cash litigating.

Look a bit deeper and you got a board of directors to full of the great and the good you could choke on it.

If you’re a bit higher end you look at it and think this bunch are the entire cast of the muppet show bouncing around on their HSBC credit card, and soon it’s gonna hit it’s limit.

Ya got Crazy Harry, Waldorf, Statler, gonzo, Kermit, and at least one Miss Piggy. Of that lot, only Crazy Harry really understands the business.

Then you read their report and one of the things they say is that the entire board look at each case they litigate. So ya got the entire board looking at me with my leasehold properties, they knew about every one, and the unexpired leases, and title were public knowledge. Not one of my properties was mortgageable because the leases were too short. Not one. And yet the cast of the muppet show decided to litigate.

So there’s that at the lower end, and at the higher end you have the cases like the Cartel Cases where these guys are properly funded and they look at Manolete within £3-4M of the cap on their HSBC revolver and they think FU. We’ll just spin this down the road until you chumps run out of OPM.

Vague references to these cases being on hold to give time to negotiate a settlement.

Sun Tsu 101 - exhaust your enemy.

Poasting in haste here as I am a 56 year old bankrupt with two children under two and I need to work tomorrow but @FoMo I will poast publicly.

@Tommy, many years ago I used to work for Computer Associates selling enterprise management software and they had a huge direct sales teal all on £100k ++ basic.

And it was a standard sales tactic to put a big number on the board, let’s say £900k to the NHS. And this guy would glide through hanging out in the pub for 9 months because no one really dared to challenge this yuge deal.

The thing is that eventually the plausible deniability began to run thin because nothing much was moving forward with this deal so this guy would put another deal on the board, British Airways for £1.5M!!!!! Yay!!!!

And so with that he would raise the stakes in the poker game. The original deal is ‘t moving it now he’s got this brilliant deal and it was a poker bluff. This went on for years, all the time he’s in the pub on his yuge basic and expenses and DGAF.

Moar at the weekend when I have time.

Well, they can’t really pay dividends so it’s all about the wages 😂

Thanks FoMo

 

Done a bit of googling and I can’t believe you’re a bag holder here?!

 

You know a lot about banks and I might hit you up but on balance I want to move on.

 

@Sallad3 - The strategy is indeed to say “you did this give it back or else” but there’s also an element in my case (and probably most) where they broadcast it far and wide which I think is an attempt to exert lateral pressure. They knew where I lived and could have used a process server and just got me direct but instead chose to write to me at all my investment properties and also to my ex wife.

 

Other tactics were fairly sh**, specifically I had made the mistake of telling them my wife was heavily pregnant and I so I couldn’t do certain dates for the “settlement negotiation”. She was due in December 2024 and on almost the last working day or 2024 just before the Xmas break they wrote to me threatening to freeze my assets. They went on to say “they knew my wife was pregnant and really didn’t want to take that course of action”. They wanted a decision by the first working day back after Xmas. So that’s a fairly blatant and sh** tactic.

 

Fortunately my wife is made of sterner stuff and I told Manolete to GFY because I didn’t think they’d get an asset freeze past a judge.

 

It’s been said that they have deep pockets, but they don’t. Any operating cash they’ve got comes from HSBC. Having already floated and taken investors money, it’s not enough and their day to day existence is in the gift of HSBC.

 

For those others of you that have a room temperature IQ you could take a view of repeating what I’ve already admitted to. Yes I was wrong I had taken dividends incorrectly. That’s what the court decided.

 

If you can think further than that you might want to consider if you got paid? and the answer is that no, you didn’t in full. Nowhere near.

 

So you gotta look at Manoletes diligence - well, my wife did laugh when she read about that on their website.

 

In my case I’m sure they did the checks. All of my assets were leasehold investment properties, all needed upgrading before they could be sold, all needed the leases extending, and all carried a very substantial CGT bill in the event of crystallisation.

 

On top of that I think Manolete knew the outstanding balances on the mortgages. Armed with that ^^ information anyone reasonably competent at risk analysis would conclude my situation was very touch and go. Not at all clear that they’d get their money back if they went all the way. They (you bagholders) didn’t get paid fully - just about half probably, though I didn’t bother counting but I expect they lost quite a lot.

 

So the first question, why did they go for someone so marginal? And it’s got to be because they’re under pressure to grow, there aren’t enough candidates with enough clear assets to do it and so they had to go for a marginal like me and on balance if they bring enough p

So @sallad “My feeling, right or wrong, is that there isn't a lot of working capital/facility slack around.”

 

I have a friend who is an anaesthetist and runs A&E at a large hospital and he says that “gut feeling” is your subconscious recognising a pattern it’s seen in the past. He realised this because when a patient presents and is very sick, he should follow XYZ protocol. But he says there isn’t time. If he did that, the patient would die so he goes on gut. He retrospectively analysed his actions and realised that he’s acted in response to how he’d managed a similar situation I the past given more time. His gut responded correctly and guided him.

 

So @Sallad, your gut feeling, which has always been my gut feeling is probably correct. I think it’s also the gut feeling of some of the people on the other side of the large cases and that’s why they’re frustrating settlement.

 

The question also begs what do they tell HSBC? Was the number in the far right cell of my line on the spreadsheet bigger or smaller than their potential liability on my case? I’ll bet it was bigger. So the bank thought that the bit of their revolving credit line which was used to fund the action against me was covered. But I don’t think, in the lite of day, it was. The case against me started in 2021, and they got their small dividend from my (bankruptcy) just now.

 

So now my case has finished the bank will review that amongst all the rest, and in the current climate they’ll want to know why the figures were out, and more importantly what the status of all the other lines on the spreadsheet are?

 

If they’ve jacked the interest rate a bit it may be because they want to use someone like Kroll to trawl through it and independently assess the score which has to be paid for.

 

How exposed are they?

 

Perhaps this is why Cooklin won’t talk about the covenants.

 

Too much clarity on covenants would expose the true position about future revenues from the drip income from settled cases.

 

If the bank have decided they want out, it’ll get interesting. I’m sure there will be time and options but the time won’t be unlimited. If they think the revolver will go solid against a deteriorating asset base they’ll act.

 

For those of you that think “Manolete have deep pockets”, they don’t, it’s all very superficial. Enough to kick over a small guy like me, but not even close if sh** gets serious on bigger cases.

 

Bag holders Valued investors flapping around in the wind lol…

 

 

 

 

As a former customer of Manolete it’s quite poetic that today there share price dropped below £1 for the first time.

It’s been an interesting ride that started with a letter from Leon Head from xxxxx telling me that Manolete had bought the case and they had an overdraft facility of £20M no less and they would use this to f*** me if I didn’t play ball.

Today I received confirmation from the insolvency practitioners that my IVA is concluded.

At the beginning Manoletes Lawyers wrote to me at every address I owned, had lived at I the last decade and also wrote to my ex wife. As a result of that my oldest son who lived with her refused to speak to me for the past 3 years.

When the claim emerged I spoke to my accountant who said he didn’t feel I’d done anything wrong but I fortunately he died prior to the trial. He also said that at the time they made the initial claim / threats they didn’t really have anything to go on because at that point he hadn’t provided anything. I’ll say now that I lost the case and so obviously I had been wrong and I accepted the judgement that was handed down.

That didn’t mean that I could actually pay - or - that I was prepared to borrow the money necessary to pay. A friend offered but I declined.

I’ve seen these small listed companies before and more often than not they don’t make it. A business is something that continues to operate if the top dog isn’t there anymore. I pulled the debenture from companies house and it showed that Cooklin is in golden handcuffs. A condition of the debenture was that he had to retain a certain percentage of the company holdings. HSBC clearly don’t regard it as a “business”, they want Cooklin there holding it together.

So I fought for 3 reasons:

Firstly I had been told by my accountant (incorrectly) that I’d done nothing wrong.

Secondly either settling or losing was going to wipe me out.

Thirdly they were such arrogant ar******* that I didn’t want to pay so thought I’d run with it as opposed to borrowing from a friend / getting caught with the slow death of huge monthly payments to settle.

Finally, I looked at the business and thought there was a very good chance that Manolete wouldn’t make it to trial.

I thought that the bank really were in the driving seat. From experience there will be monthly meetings with the bank and there will be a big spreadsheet of all the ongoing cases, but also all the cases that are paying under an agreement. Theres probably also a column on the right with an estimate of the wealth of each individual “customer”. That’s a rough figure of the net worth of each “customer” that is paying under the plan. The bank will probably want to know this so they can grasp the cold blood covenant value of each person paying under an agreement.

Finally the bank will load this with a multiplier and then they’ll do an NPV on the future instalments and they’ll lend less than that on a revolving basis.

The way Manolete acted was just like a high stakes poker game. Which it was. They were desperate, and I mean desperate to settle and this was very obvious.

It’s not like it’s doing anything anyone wants like making decent ice cream. The only thing it tries to do is make money and so far, to be brutally honest it’s not been very good at it.

A large part of their market is that “errant directors” had overdrawn DLA accounts or had taken improper dividends. The thing is, the only reason directors did that was because dividends were so much more tax advantageous than salary. That tax benefit is more or less dead, plus the knowledge that you can’t take dividends if notional profit isn’t clear and in the bank is very common now. It is now the case that most directors know another director who has coma a cropper like this and we speak to each other.

So my theory which may be right and may be wrong is that there’s a tipping point for them. All that needs to happen is they pick on a few guys like me who didn’t have much to lose PLUS the covenant value of some of the people currently paying reduces and they decide to throw in the towel rather than keep paying and the revolving credit line will track up, at the same time Manolete will have to reduce head count, and then the illusion will be over and this will be a penny share.

It was always funny that they named the business after a bullfighter who died after he was so badly damaged by a bull he chose to fight.

I’m under no illusion that it will take a bigger bull than me, but it’s when not if.

If you’re sitting there wondering why XYZ cases haven’t settled yet, it’s because the people on the other side of those very large cases are thinking exactly the same as me. Manolete are vulnerable and given enough time it’ll be over, so they’re holding out, and will frustrate everything to drag it out.