Astute Capital has filed interim accounts for the half-year ending September 2019.
As at September 2019 the company was on the edge of solvency with £6,000 in net liabilities.
According to director Richard Symonds, in April 2019 the company closed operations in Leeds and terminated all relationships with unregulated introducers. By this point of course the company had already raised £15 million.
Compliance support consultant Thistle Initiatives were hired to ensure Astute Capital “remained fully compliant throughout the entire investor marketing and on-boarding process”.
Whether Thistle had anything to say about Astute Capital’s risk-warning-deprived Google ads direct to investors is not known.
Nor is it known whether Thistle had any say in Astute’s marketing strategy of scrubbing the Internet of posts critical of the company, which we know from the evidence it left took place between June 2019 and November 2019 (when I noticed it).
Astute has provided the FCA and other unspecified third parties with “due diligence packs” prepared by Thistle, and apparently intends to consider becoming FCA regulated in 2020. Good luck to them with that.
Astute has been hit by the collapse of Reyker Securities, which acted as custodian for a large number of Astute investors. No investor funds are missing as a result of Reyker’s failure according to Astute’s director.
Investor funds are on-lent to Astute Capital Advisors. At time of writing ACA is nearly a month overdue with its accounts.