Investment Management Association chairman Douglas Ferrans this week said the scale of recent investment failures, including Keydata, was on a par with the Barlow Clowes scandal of the 1980s.
Some (most?) of you will be able to remember what Ferrans was talking about, but what exactly was Barlow Clowes, and what went wrong? Investment broker Barlow Clowes collapsed in 1988. Nothing unusual about that. Except the group of companies run by Peter Clowes (pictured) was found to have fraudulently misappropriated investors' funds. So how did it entice investor cash in the first place? Barlow Clowes offered the market a fund which purported to invest in low-risk Government gilt-edged stock, but promised a significantly higher yield than gilts were paying at the time. As ...
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