Couple’s pension misplaced after being lured into tax avoidance scheme

A former police sergeant and his PC spouse have instructed how their pensions had been ‘worn out’ once they had been lured into investing their nest-eggs right into a tax avoidance scheme utilized by footballers and celebrities.

Simon Nokes, 58, and his spouse Sonya, 53, put their South Yorkshire Police pensions right into a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) arrange by controversial superstar wealth adviser Tim Levy, 55.

But the scheme collapsed a number of years in the past, taking a lot of the proceeds of their pensions with it, after Sonya invested £50,000 of her cash and Simon a staggering £500,000.

Just earlier than Christmas they obtained a requirement for £285,000 in unpaid tax from HMRC, with the sum growing every month with curiosity.

The couple had been awarded round £43,000 every by the Financial Conduct Authority as victims of mis-selling by the monetary advisor who advisable the scheme known as Elysian Fuels, aimed toward excessive net-worth people.

While the cash awarded kind of coated the price of Sonya’s funding, it coated solely a fraction of Simon’s funding — and their pensions are price nothing now.  

But Simon is candid about his personal half: ‘It’s embarrassing to confess it, but it surely was greed and naivety that led us into it,’ he instructed MailOnline. ‘I did hold asking if this scheme was official, and I suppose the outdated saying is true – if it sounds too good to be true, then it most likely is.’

Even now, Simon admits he’s ‘bamboozled’ by how the scheme was purported to work, just like a variety of movie financing LLPs which had been invested in by celebrities akin to David Beckham and Sir Alex Ferguson, earlier than being challenged by HMRC.

Elysian Fuels was first launched in 2013 as a part of a Bioethanol plant in Grimsby. Over £200 million was invested, with round 90% of that determine coming from Self-Invested Personal Pension (SIPP) investments and financial savings.

Investors needed to buy at the very least £50,000 price of shares, with the concept placing cash within the undertaking earlier than promoting the funding to their private pension they may declare extra of the cash again in tax aid.

The gasoline firm described itself as a inexperienced funding into the UK’s biofuel business that many buyers simply could not flip down. It attracted funding from former Liverpool supervisor Rafael Benitez, ex-Chelsea goalkeeper Carlo Cudicini and one-time snooker world champion Stephen Hendry,

But when the worth of oil drastically fell, Elysian Fuels was dropped from the Channel Islands Stock Exchange and buyers misplaced their cash. Now, the investments are nugatory and have left many retirement savers empty-handed.

‘We did not go into it as a get wealthy fast factor,’ stated father-of-three Simon from Doncaster. ‘It was simply advisable to us as probably the most environment friendly use of our pensions.’

After 26 years in South Yorkshire Police, Simon invested his £500k SIPP pot into the scheme round 2013, and his Sonya a smaller quantity after she served with the pressure about half as lengthy.

The couple did make some cash from the scheme for some time, however when the oil value fell, they watched their goals of a cheerful, comfy retirement go up in smoke.

‘That was dangerous sufficient,’ recalled Simon. ‘Luckily the cash we did make went into homes, relatively than having a very good time and happening vacation.’

The stress of ready for the ultimate invoice drove the couple to separate up for some time, and Sonya purchased a separate residence the place she now lives along with her mom. The Nokes’s at the moment are again collectively, although nonetheless proudly owning two homes between them.

In 2019 the couple had been warned by HMRC that they’d face a tax demand because the scheme had been judged to not be tax-compliant, however the quantity had not been determined.

Then final Christmas, the bombshell demand of £285,000 dropped, leaving the couple with no selection however to promote their property to fulfill the invoice, or face chapter.

‘We’ll should promote Sonya’s home,’ stated Simon, ‘which can imply we’ll even have to start out once more by way of leaving something for our kids.

I’ve requested HMRC to droop the curiosity on the quantity owed whereas we get the funds in place, however I’ve not heard again from them.

‘I simply need folks to know that it is not solely the super-rich who fell sufferer to those schemes, it was peculiar folks like us as properly. There are much more like us.’

The Elysian scheme was just like movie financing schemes akin to Ingenious Media, which attracted the cash of stars from the worlds of sport and leisure, together with David Beckham, Ant and Dec and Jeremy Paxman.

The firm did fund greater than 60 movies together with Avatar and Brooklyn, but it surely and schemes prefer it had been branded ‘scams for scumbags’ by one former HMRC boss.

Two years in the past, MailOnline reported how Tim Levy and his spouse Roxana, 41, as homeowners of one other LLP known as Cocoon Wealth, which went into administration in 2020, had been being sued for £26.7 million by directors on behalf of out-of-pocket buyers.

It was claimed that he made funds from Cocoon including as much as £12.3 million for the acquisition and maintenance of his villa in Aix-en-Provence within the south of France.

The paperwork additionally alleged that the LLP made funds of an additional £7.8 million to Levy with ‘no consideration or profit to the claimant [Cocoon]’.

The directors sought a declaration from the High Court that the villa is the property of Cocoon and never the Levys.

Mr Levy instructed MailOnline this week that the Cocoon case had been settled out of court docket for less than £650,000.

He added: ‘Of the £27m or so, about £20m was owed to corporations that I used to be the useful proprietor of, so successfully, the corporate owed me the vast majority of the debt.’

As for buyers such because the Nokes, he stated: ‘We created the funding product, and we then promoted it to monetary advisors, whose job it was to find out the suitability of the funding for his or her shoppers. We did not have any function in that in any respect. ‘

‘It sounds to me like an Independent Financial Advisor who did not know their consumer properly sufficient and did not perceive their circumstances was advising them to do one thing that she or he should not have been.’

Mother-of-three Roxana has 25,000 followers on her non-public Instagram account @thisladyrox, which, earlier than it went non-public, described her as a ‘enjoyable, frisky and cunning mum’.

Now, she exhibits glamorous movies of the couple’s enviable way of life on her TikTok account which has 139 followers.

The Levys had been married in type on the unique £500-a-night Grand Hotel du Cap-Ferat in Nice in June 2019.

Mr Levy, who describes himself as a ‘serial entrepreneur’, instructed MailOnline he’s at the moment engaged on a ‘high secret’ AI undertaking.