Banned boss in £3m con

by Tony Hetherington

ANYONE attracted by plots of land being offered for sale in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, should beware.

A firm called the European Land Sales Partnership has bought a field for £90,000 and is now marketing it in house-size plots for a total of about £3m. The catch is that there is no planning permission and investors could wait decades in the hope of winning permission and making a profit.

Why is this business operating as a partnership and not a limited company? Well, it could be because boss Stephen James Cleeve is banned from being a director of any company until 2008.

In 1997, I named him as the brains behind Forrester & Lamego and the Napier Spirit Company, two scam investment companies that sold vastly overpriced wine and whisky. Both were closed by the High Court after intervention by the Department of Trade and Industry.