Barley Investments Ltd

– Chapter 3

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3. Money Recovery

When we cannot contact Carl Thomas Senior for Barclays Barley Ltd, we found the company that audited for Barclays. The company name was Slaughter & May.

3.1 Slaughter and May

Our Compliance Team found the auditor for Barley Investments Ltd, Slaughter and May. Slaughter and May is a law firm but it had acted as the auditor for Barley.

Initially, Slaughter and May denied any relationship with Barley. However, when we showed the document proof, they had no choice but to admit.

In general, they were cooperative, but sadly, we were informed that Barley rejected our request to give any feedback or communicate with us. (Refer to the proof doc and the email reply from Slaughter and May.)

Remarks: Since Barley is a full subsidiary of Barclays Bank, and Barclays Bank has a branch in Singapore, why didn’t Barley redirect us to Barclays Bank’s Singapore legal department to assist us in our clarification? That was what Deutsche Bank did, when we seek assistance on another UK fraudulent provider, Guarantees EU Ltd.

3.2 Termination of Carl Thomas Senior

Shortly after our first email to Slaughter and May, we noticed a new filing in the Company House. Mr. Carl Thomas Senior was terminated effectively from 15th March 2016.

Then, if you noticed the second (right) email above, Slaughter and May replied after Carl Thomas Senior was terminated.

Was this termination just a coincidence? If you read on, you will doubt that as much as we did. The “excuse” he gave upon receiving our legal claim letter was ridiculous!

After receiving our legal letter, Barley only replied AFTER filing a change of company name from Barley Investments Ltd to Barclays (Barley) Ltd, and the domain www.barleyinvestment.co.uk became unregistered.

As the domain registrar does not share when a domain was deregistered and we had no authority to request for the info, we are unable to provide the actual date of deregistration. We had earlier requested for information with Nominet UK but there was no reply. Nominet UK was only cooperative after we share the Police Report we submitted to Singapore Police Force.

The dates and events of changes above were too coincidental. For us to believe that Barley was not involved in the fraud, we sincerely cannot believe.

Initially, we suspected that an insider within Barley used Carl Thomas Senior’s name to cheat. But, now, we highly suspect Carl Thomas Senior did this himself or definitely an accomplice.

Frankly, we just wanted refund of US$35K. We had no intention to taint Barclays Bank’s reputation. We were even prepared to let this lost go if we receive an apology from Barley for not replying to our inquiry through Slaughter and May. But, to insult us during the trial and having the Judge imposing compensation to Barley was totally insulting and unreasonable!

3.3 Our Visit at Registered Address

We made a trip to London in Dec 2016 and try to visit Barley. We went to the Receptionist of the building and the Receiptionist had not heard of the company.

3.4 GMail Support

To confirm that there were no email phishing scams, as was mentioned in our Due Diligence Tips, we contact the IT Support from Google since we are paid customer of Gmail.

Google confirmed the email exchanges between EFE and Barley were from authentic email sources.