Further checks revealed that Kelly Bell is indeed's David Bell's wife and that she bought all the company assets for £30k (see page 7 of Statement of administrator's proposal document). While the stock was valued at £27,998 the other items sold were Seller's records at £ 1, Customer Contracts £ 1 and Intellectual Property £ 2,000 (website code, domain name, company name, etc). This to me seems surreal as I would have imagined those 3 things could be a lot more valuable than that, specially to Vesternet's competitors. Now I don't want to claim this is a smoking gun but at the very least this is all very suspicious. It's a well known tactic that some company directors use in the UK when companies get into difficulty which then declare themselves bankrupt, put the company in administration and all the company's debts are written off while the company then resurfaces trading with a family member in charge and/or a different name. The state of affairs document posted by the Administrators (see here) seems to show debts of nearly half a million pounds which is quite significant. David Bell has an outstanding company loan of £275k. The document claims the company got into cashflow issues due to rapid expansion and used several high interest loans and VAT (aka TAX) money to increase stock and increase sales. While sales turnover was dramatically increased (2016 turnover was £1.4m) the business wasn't viable. This quite common on small companies that grow too fast and loose control of their costs.
So those are pretty much all the facts. I don't have any more information as to whether Vesternet.com (now trading under Smartech Holdings Ltd) will honour current and future orders, support and warranty cases. The item I recently ordered is allegedly in transit and should arrive this week. I will advice people to be careful with future orders. I can suggest the following:
- Split large purchases into smaller orders and wait for each order to arrive before you order again, to reduce risk of non-delivery.
Always use a credit card but be aware that to be protected under UK's section 75 the item must be worth between £ 100 and £ 30,000 (see here)
Assume items will come with no support or no warranty and that you might not get your money back if you want to return them