Claims Direct founder faces fresh ire from shareholders

As reported in last week's press round-up (see [2002] Gazette, 19 September, 10), the saga of Claims Direct has not yet come to an end.

While last week it was the former shareholders of the collapsed claims handlers who were in the news - 7,000 of whom were seeking compensation for the money they lost when the company folded earlier this year - it was now the turn of the company's founders.

Proof positive that you cannot keep a determined man down, The Observer reported that Colin Poole, Claims Direct's 'youthful former chief executive' who made 'an estimated 10 million personal fortune from selling shares in the company before bad publicity and heavy losses forced it to close' (15 September), was back for a second bite at the cherry.

Mr Poole, who is also senior partner of Shropshire-based law firm Poole & Co, recently set up Axcess Legal, a claims management company - or as The Observer put it, 'a new ambulance- chasing business' - which is ironically set to hire out Claims Direct's former premises as office space.

This development, says the paper, is 'set to anger shareholders who allege they were misled about Claims Direct's prospects when it floated two years ago'.

Another high-profile multi-party action hit the headlines this week.

The Guardian reported that 'a 21 million settlement for 7,500 South African asbestos victims by the British building materials company Cape is on the point of collapse because the company has not been able to come up with the money' (19 September).

Cape agreed to pay the settlement in December last year to claimants who worked at or lived near the asbestos mining operation, which was run in South Africa until 1979.

However, no money has as yet been forthcoming, and claimants' solicitor Richard Meeran of London-based Leigh Day & Co told the paper 'the settlement is off .

We gave them some extensions because they said restructuring would take some time, but it has become clear that the problems are more fundamental than that.'

The claimants are now going to court to try to get their hands on the money, and Mr Meeran stresses that 'these people are desperate - many have borrowed money on the understanding that they would receive their share of the settlement at the end of June.'

Nicholas van Hoogstraten - the property magnate jailed earlier this year for the manslaughter of an associate - was in the news this week.

But not this time for his unscrupulous treatment of tenants, but for 'invoking the Human Rights Act in an effort to secure the legal services of a controversial Italian lawyer' (Financial Times, 20 September).

Being an inmate of Belmarsh high-security prison in south-east London has obviously not dented van Hoogstraten's desire to have things his way.

According to the newspaper: 'Lawyers for the property magnate this week secured a judicial review of the prison governor's refusal to allow Giovanni di Stefano - who represented Serbian warlord Arkan and timeshare fraudster John 'Goldfinger' Palmer - to visit van Hoogstraten'.

The paper states that van Hoogstraten has apparently 'dispensed with the legal team that handled his murder trial', and set his sights on Mr di Stefano, citing his human right to have legal assistance of his own choosing.

However, lawyers for the Prison Service appear to see things differently, as Mr di Stefano has not been granted permission to visit the jail.

The prison claims firstly that he does not qualify as a person entitled to visit as a legal representative, and also, said the newspaper, 'indicated they needed to be satisfied as to the character of Mr di Stefano'.

Victoria MacCallum