LAWYERS in Europe have revealed a second complaint has been lodged in a case concerning an alleged multi-million pound overseas scam involving an East Staffordshire businessman.<\/p>\n
It has emerged that more than 30 people from Britain and Ireland have now lodged a collective action in Madrid after losing hundreds of thousands of pounds to Ocean View Properties (OVP), a firm run by Colin Thomas, of Town Hill, Yoxall.<\/p>\n
The case is set to be heard alongside a long-standing class action lawsuit against Spanish developer Ricardo Miranda Miret.<\/p>\n
Mr Thomas has already been served a subpoena to appear at a court in Spain earlier this year, only for the case to be delayed after the trial judge had be to be changed.<\/p>\n
A court date is expected to be revealed in the next few weeks so that the cases can be heard in tandem.<\/p>\n
If Mr Thomas does not appear, a European arrest warrant will be issued.<\/p>\n
Antonio Flores<\/strong>, the Spanish prosecuting lawyer from Marbella-based firm Lawbird<\/strong>, said: \u201cThe court has deemed it necessary that Colin Thomas and others attend personally, rather than giving a statement in the UK, on grounds of the complexity of the case, the volume of documentation and the principle of judicial immediacy.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce they are summoned again, failing to turn up could trigger the issue of an European Arrest Warrant.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t believe OVP knew anything about what was going on but this was a scam of huge proportions.\u201d<\/p>\n A criminal claim for fraud and misappropriation of funds was lodged in February 2011 in a bid to recover deposits paid by investors to (OVP).<\/p>\n The company was set up in 2001 by buy-to-let millionaire Thomas and other businessmen.<\/p>\n It was behind a string of successful overseas propoerty enterprises but ran into difficulties when it became involved as a UK agent for Spanish developer Ricardo Miranda Miret.<\/p>\n More than 1,000 British investors, who paid a total of \u00a345 million for \u2018off-plan\u2019 overseas property developments, have lost their money after the firm was formally dissolved in 2009 with the appointment of liquidators Grant Thornton.<\/p>\n The court claims are linked to developments which never materialised.<\/p>\n Mr Thomas is currently banned from being a company director for nine years following an Insolvency Service investigation.<\/p>\n He was also cleared by the Serious Fraud Office and Staffordshire Police following an investigation into the collapse of OVP.<\/p>\n Former OVP boss Thomas, others accused and Miranda have all \u2018strongly denied\u2019 any wrongdoing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LAWYERS in Europe have revealed a second complaint has been lodged in a case concerning an alleged multi-million pound overseas scam involving an East Staffordshire businessman. It has emerged that more than 30 people from Britain and Ireland have now lodged a collective action in Madrid after losing hundreds of thousands of pounds to Ocean […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[58,59],"class_list":["post-1200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lawbird-in-the-media","tag-antonio-flores","tag-lawbird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1201,"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200\/revisions\/1201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}