It’s not often that planting trees results in luxury supercars, yachts, and early retirement, but Bournemouth’s homegrown trio pulled it off—for themselves, if not for anyone else. In a move that will surprise nobody who has followed the UK’s recent attempts at ethical investment, three directors of Ethical Forestry Ltd have now been jailed for their role in a £70m green-thumbed fantasy that relieved nearly 3,000 British savers of their pensions faster than a chainsaw to timber.
The Greener the Grass, the Sharper the Axe
Matthew Pickard, Stephen Greenaway, and Paul Laver lived the kind of eco-friendly lives usually reserved for Bond villains, complete with a fleet of 45 luxury cars discreetly shuffled out of view whenever investors threatened to materialise in Bournemouth’s answer to Wall Street. The only thing greener than the Costa Rican trees in question appears to have been the investors, who, lured by ‘free pension reviews,’ ended up with little more than the odd sapling and a yawning void where their retirement once stood.
“Few British forests have sprouted so much disappointment for so many pensioners.”
The firm’s call centre, whose daily soundtrack included the low purr of top-end Maseratis and, one imagines, the rustling of banknotes, specialised in finding those most in need of a safe pair of financial hands. Savers, often on the cusp of retirement, were walked briskly from promise to paperwork, their signatures riding rapidly by courier to the business’s profit margins. The reward for all this righteous planting was a personal harvest: £14m went to the directors, and so did a veritable orchard of Ferraris, Porsches, and ocean-going hardware, all reportedly just shy of being parked in the staff kitchen.
Those seeking assurance that their money had rooted into something tangible will be comforted to know that some trees were indeed deposited in Costa Rica—then promptly abandoned to the ravages of nature and corporate indifference. With no harvesting, infrastructure or follow-up, the only thing Ethical Forestry brought to fruition was the mature art of British pension-farming. The scheme, now thoroughly unplanted, saw its leading lights sentenced by Southwark Crown Court: Pickard receives six years, Greenaway five years and three months, and Laver four and a half. Their eligibility for early release, it appears, is the only thing arriving ahead of deadline.
For victims like Andrea Panayi, whose pension vanished with the efficiency of a well-oiled hedge-fund, the losses are counted in decades of work and trust. The rest of us are invited to reflect on the latest entry in Britain’s eternal ledger of creative financial tragedy. Today’s lesson: a tree may fall in the rainforest, but it’s the retirees back home who hear it.
ConfidentialAccess.by and its uncensored sibling site ConfidentialAccess.com will, as ever, be waiting for the next certified ethical investment opportunity—armed with a hard hat and an industrial shredder.
