GlenB said:
Tombri said:
I am happy to sign a petition.
Who knows how to start an 'official' one?
We have had 17 forum pages of words. - time for a little action.
I think it should be started on the basis of trying to persue not only an investigation into Gmund cars and Andrew Mearns, but also ensure regulations are brought in to protect people selling cars SOR. Should be done by ring fencing the asset and protecting the cash once it's sold. In the same way a tenants security deposit is protected when renting. Let's be fair a tenants deposit is peanuts in comparison to these values!
Unfortunately ring fenced accounts holding funds on trust (ie outside the scope of company liability / assets) are harder to get than a commitment from Zingari to buy a £20k mint 993 :hand:
Banks will only give them to 'regulated" businesses eg solicitors. Accountants, and certain regulate industries eg Letting Agencies (although that has only been forced through via back door statute changes this year).
The way the Lettings agency works now with client funds is that they have to be insured against fraud / abuse. However to get that
Insurance you have to be a member of a regulated body and have a trust fund client account in place with a bank. a bank won;t give you one of those unless your regulated and so it forces letting agents to become regulated by the back door.
Therefore to force cars sales to adopt a similar policy for client funds under SOR sales would force either the banks to relax their requirements for trust accounts (will never happen) or new laws forcing regulation. There is a massive cost to that to even get a regulatory body in place (paid for via subscription from its members), it takes years and a lot of commitment to get that sort of thing in place. The issue here is simply not significant enough to make that a priority as there are lots and lots of other financial transaction areas that are abused involving much much more money that will always take a priority for legislators.
So great idea in theory and would work but it will never happen unless the issue gets much bigger (I'm talking tens of millions of pounds).
The issue for me is that as with most commercial transactions there is an element of trust. It's simple for me that when that trust is abused and people are blatantly and consciously defrauded in the transaction then there simply has to be a penalty, otherwise they will just do it again and again as has happened here. That is where the b police step in, or rather should but totally fail to take any interest whatsoever as its a 'civil" not a criminal matter. That is total and utter *****, it is criminal end of. They are just being lazy and claiming lack of resource. It's a farce. I've had exactly the same happen to me twice in the last year (involving thefts from company not me personally) where we have admissions of guilt and full evidence provided to the police and they have simply not been interested.
That is the root of the issue here to me. People do wrong, break the law, break that basic trust and use it to just rip more people off, that should be punished. The police are totally failing to protect the public, that is core to their role/purpose and they are failing more and more to meet that basic role.
I think a 'in the public interest" campaign to get the police to at least investigate the crimes of Andrew and Samantha Means is what is required here. Any petition has to appeal to more than just Porsche or even general car enthusiasts, it has to go to basic principles of what is right and wrong and in that way may get the momentum needed on social media / the press to get something done about it.
There is a wider issue here based on my experience and that is what we have to appeal to joe public to help with via a petition IMHO
and inform him about criminal activity of Councillor Samantha Mearns.
