Stop Thief!

 

Best Years, the soft toy wholesaler, will be 10 years old next year and like all businesses has experienced its fair share of wierd situations. Howver just recently we have walked in to a situation which is truely bizarre, and quite frankly, wrong!

It all started in August 2008 when a Mr Simon Osbourne of Warmwood Ltd, Swindon ordered over £5000 worth of goods for an urgent delivery. It soon became clear that he had no intention of paying for the goods so we started court proceedings to get either our money or our goods back. The landlord of Mr Simon Osbourne's premises then called to say that we had been conned. Mr Simon Osbourne was a thief and a conman and we had no chance of getting our money back.

Its here where things get wierd. We contacted the police ( Crime ref 5408 007 7153 if you are interested) but their advice was that they could do nothing and our best course of action was to take an advert out in the local Swindon paper to advise other people that Warmwood Ltd may not be an honest company to deal with! The fact that we could show 3 different companies who had had goods stolen from them by Mr Simon Osbourne of Warmwood Ltd was irrelevant. They would not treat the case as a criminal matter

We then contacted the court services but we would have to pay £600 to take Warmwood to court and that if the company was made insolvent the day before the court hearing we would not get any money. Even if it did get to court and the case was awarded in our favour then the court could not force Warmwood Ltd to pay the money back we would need to go to the High Court to get an injunction

So we contacted Companies House. They advised us that we could make a formal complaint but that whether or not they would investigate Warmwood Ltd or Simon Osbourne would be kept a secret. They said that we should complain to our MP or to Trading Standards

I will contact my MP and see what he recommends....perhaps the European court!

What does it take to stop this sort of illegal behaviour? If anyone has any ideas or suggestions please do let us know but other wise I am hoping that the next person who is contacted by Simon Osbourne of Warmwood Ltd Swindon will search the internet and see this article.

NB his email address is simontipthai@googlemail.com and his home telephone 01793778272 and his mobile number is 07948 406622

 
Update May 2009. Since I originally wrote the article I have had feedback from 3 different sources

Firstly I had a lot of advice and feedback from our retailers which was brilliant and very supportive

We were also contacted by other companies who had been scammed by Simon Osbourne. None of them were soft toy wholesalers like Best Years and the range of goods ranged from batteries to hire equipment. Some of them were fortunate enough to have seen the article before they supplied goods but sadly more were from people who had also been ripped off

Funnily enough the other person who contacted us was Mr Osbourne himself. He rang up screaming and shouting at us to remove the article immediately which I have to say made me laugh. He then said that he would pay the invoice if we took the article down but funnily enough it never arrived

By involving our MP we were able to get the police to open a fraud investiation but then last week we were contacted by the offical receiver to say that Warmwood had finally been put in to administration
Since August 2008 we have contacted every single government organisation we could think of to stop Simon Osbourne from ripping people off. In the time it took to get him closed down he stole approx £100,000 off other businesses
Hopefully he will go to jail. We'll let you know!

Update Oct 2009

It appears that the CPS don't want to pursue the case against Simon Osbourne as because he set up a business he can claim that he wasn't obtaining goods by deception it was simply a case of his business getting in to trouble

I don't think so! Any small business knows how hard it is to make a profit and I am not prepared to have a thief like Simon Osbourne order goods with no intention of paying for them and get away with it

CPS here I come....