Four mentions, four spellings in Crónica Global’s piece about a British tub in the Pujol clan’s money laundry. This dyslexia appears sourced from Antonio Fernández’s new book, Pujol & Puig, which mixes the forms “Brantridge” and “Brandtridge”.
CG follows the Spanish practice of assuming that foreigners also have two surnames, and refers to “Herbert Arthur Rainford Towning” as “Rainford.” In fact I think this individual is probably generally known as Herbert Towning or Herbert Rainford-Towning, and the judicial investigation will be simpler if this is known and digested.
Re an internet marketing scam, the Daily Mail/This Is Money wrote in 2002:
Here, one of the people behind Fast2Net is Herbert Towning. He told me: ‘We have about 11,000 website owners in England. When you buy the website, you are linked to a series of merchants who supply various services, depending on which sites you buy.’
So doesn’t this mean that if you sign up with Fast2Net, you are immediately in competition with 11,000 people who are already in the same business? The simple answer is yes, but according to Towning this is not as bad as it seems, since there are almost 60 million people in Britain.
Finding Herbert Towning listed as a director of Fast2Net was a real blast from the past for me. More than 20 years ago he was declared bankrupt with debts of millions of pounds after he ran a fringe bank, David Samuel Trust, which collapsed. Another of his companies, casino group Scotia Investments, was the target for a Department of Trade investigation.
More recently, he was active in the US, investing in and speaking in support of a company called International Heritage. More than 150,000 people joined before it collapsed into bankruptcy.
The watchdog Securities & Exchange Commission says International Heritage was nothing more than a huge pyramid scheme, perhaps the biggest America has ever seen.
Our Herbert, a true son of that most glorious and extraordinary of enterprises, British India, seems to have spent most of his life exploiting jurisdictional uncertainty (and perhaps cross-cultural confusion) for financial gain – see e.g. this 1998 EFTA Court case regarding Liechtenstein. It is curious and embarrassing that CG provincialises and belittles as English such a universal man. How about a claim for reputational damage in the Spanish courts?
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