Tom Winnifrith

Last updated

Thomas John Zacchaeus Winnifrith (born January 1968) is a former British journalist, share tipster and former fund manager.

Contents

Early life

Tom Winnifrith was born in 1968 [1] He studied PPE at the University of Oxford (1987–90), graduating with a lower second degree. [2]

Career

Tom Winnifrith is the founder and editor [3] of the website Shareprophets.com. He was at one stage chief executive and founder [4] of former ISDX listed Rivington Street Holdings (RSH) [5] [6] before stepping down in 2011. [7] [8]

He has formerly worked as a financial journalist for Investors Chronicle and the London Evening Standard . Winnifrith was the resident investment expert on the Channel 4 game show Show Me The Money . [8]

Controversy

Winnifrith was expelled from the Liberal Democrat Party by Paddy Ashdown in 1993 for allegedly "pandering to racism". He was subject to an investigation by Metropolitan Police Service at the request of the Attorney General at the time, Sir Nicholas Lyell, and then Shadow Cabinet Minister Jack Straw, which found no wrongdoing. [9]

In September 2017, Winnifrith authored an article that claimed that the FCA would not be shutting down Beaufort Securities. [10] In March 2018, Beaufort Securities was shut down, declared insolvent, and charged with fraud, following a joint FCA, FBI, SEC and DOJ investigation. [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]

His time as CEO of Rivington Street Holdings (RSH) has also come under criticism, including accusations of multiple compliance failures while running a regulated company and acting "ultra vires", attempting to sell an FSA regulated entity without the approval of the RSH board [16]

Personal life

Tom is married to Ranji Devadason, [17] sociology lecturer at Keele University. [18] The journalist and author Christopher Booker was his uncle. [19] [20] Winnifrith’s mother committed suicide in 1976. [21]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission</span> Government agency overseeing stock exchanges

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market manipulation.

A binary option is a financial exotic option in which the payoff is either some fixed monetary amount or nothing at all. The two main types of binary options are the cash-or-nothing binary option and the asset-or-nothing binary option. The former pays some fixed amount of cash if the option expires in-the-money while the latter pays the value of the underlying security. They are also called all-or-nothing options, digital options, and fixed return options (FROs).

Penny stocks are common shares of small public companies that trade for less than one dollar per share. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uses the term "Penny stock" to refer to a security, a financial instrument which represents a given financial value, issued by small public companies that trade at less than $5 per share. Penny stocks are priced over-the-counter, rather than on the trading floor. The term "penny stock" refers to shares that, prior to the SEC's classification, traded for "pennies on the dollar". In 1934, when the United States government passed the Securities Exchange Act to regulate any and all transactions of securities between parties which are "not the original issuer", the SEC at the time disclosed that equity securities which trade for less than $5 per share could not be listed on any national stock exchange or index.

In business, a boiler room is an outbound call center selling questionable investments by telephone. It usually refers to a room where salespeople work using unfair, dishonest sales tactics, sometimes selling penny stocks or private placements or committing outright stock fraud. A common boiler room tactic is the use of falsified and bolstered information in combination with verified company-released information. The term is pejorative: it is often used to imply high-pressure sales tactics and, sometimes, poor working conditions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ameriprise Financial</span> American financial services company

Ameriprise Financial, Inc. is an American diversified financial services company and bank holding company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It provides financial planning products and services, including wealth management, asset management, insurance, annuities, and estate planning.

Foreign exchange fraud is any trading scheme used to defraud traders by convincing them that they can expect to gain a high profit by trading in the foreign exchange market. Currency trading became a common form of fraud in early 2008, according to Michael Dunn of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TD Ameritrade</span> American online broker

TD Ameritrade was a stockbroker that offered an electronic trading platform for the trade of financial assets. The company was founded in 1975 as First Omaha Securities. In 2006, it acquired the United States operations of TD Waterhouse from Toronto-Dominion Bank and was renamed TD Ameritrade. In 2020, TD Ameritrade was acquired by Charles Schwab Corporation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">StoneX Group Inc.</span> Financial services company

StoneX Group Inc. is an American financial services company. The company operates in six areas: commercial hedging, global payments, securities, physical commodities, foreign exchange and clearing and execution services (CES).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IG Group</span> British online trading company

IG Group Holdings plc, trading as IG Group, is a United Kingdom-based online trading provider, offering access to spread betting and CFD trading, which allow traders to bet on the direction of equities, bonds and currencies without owning the underlying assets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microcap stock fraud</span> Form of securities fraud

Microcap stock fraud is a form of securities fraud involving stocks of "microcap" companies, generally defined in the United States as those with a market capitalization of under $250 million. Its prevalence has been estimated to run into the billions of dollars a year. Many microcap stocks are penny stocks, which the SEC defines as a security that trades at less than $5 per share, is not listed on a national exchange, and fails to meet other specific criteria.

Robert M. Jaffe is an American stockbroker. He was a long-time associate of Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff and promoted Madoff's fund to wealthy investors in Massachusetts and Florida.

Cohmad Securities was a US company whose main business was to introduce investors to the Bernard Madoff investment company for which it received commission based on the amount invested. The company, whose name combines “Cohn” and “Madoff,” was founded in 1985 by Bernard Madoff and Maurice Cohn, Madoff’s friend and former neighbor. Its office was located at the same address as Madoff's firm, and it employed between 10 and 20 employees with annual sales between $1M and $5M.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Madoff investment scandal</span> Investment scandal discovered in 2008

The Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. In December of that year, Bernie Madoff, the former Nasdaq chairman and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Participants in the Madoff investment scandal</span>

Participants in the Madoff investment scandal included employees of Bernard Madoff's investment firm with specific knowledge of the Ponzi scheme, a three-person accounting firm that assembled his reports, and a network of feeder funds that invested their clients' money with Madoff while collecting significant fees. Madoff avoided most direct financial scrutiny by accepting investments only through these feeder funds, while obtaining false auditing statements for his firm. The liquidation trustee of Madoff's firm has implicated managers of the feeder funds for ignoring signs of Madoff's deception.

FXCM, also known as Forex Capital Markets, is a retail foreign exchange broker for trading on the foreign exchange market. FXCM allows people to speculate on the foreign exchange market and provides trading in contract for difference (CFDs) on major indices and commodities such as gold and crude oil. It is based in London.

Merrill, previously branded Merrill Lynch, is an American investment management and wealth management division of Bank of America. Along with BofA Securities, the investment banking arm, both firms engage in prime brokerage and broker-dealer activities. The firm is headquartered in New York City, and once occupied the entire 34 stories of 250 Vesey Street, part of the Brookfield Place complex in Manhattan. Merrill employs over 14,000 financial advisors and manages $2.8 trillion in client assets. The company also operates Merrill Edge, a division for investment and related services, including call center counsultancy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin Wey</span> Chinese American businessman

Benjamin Wey is a Chinese-born US Wall Street financier and CEO of New York Global Group (NYGG). He began his financial career as an investment advisor and broker in Oklahoma in the late 1990s. Wey and NYGG were among the most active "facilitators and promoters" of reverse takeovers, which created Special-Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPAC) and allowed small Chinese companies to raise capital on U.S. markets, until reverse takeovers became the subject of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation in 2011.

The Share Centre was an independent UK retail stockbroker based in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England.

Thomas Llewellyn Kalaris is a British banker, the former chief executive of Barclays wealth and investment management.

References

  1. ↑ MR THOMAS JOHN ZACCHAEUS WINNIFRITH. Companies in the U.K. Retrieved 22 June 2015.
  2. ↑ tom winnifrith. LinkedIn. Retrieved 22 June 2015.
  3. ↑ "Woodford Internet Nemesis Claims Vindication" Nishant Kumar, Bloomberg , 8 June 2019. Retrieved 9 June 2019.
  4. ↑ "Real Man Tom slices up his empire in tasty pizza sell-off." Anna White, The Telegraph , 2 May 2012. Retrieved 22 June 2015.
  5. ↑ https://www.companiesintheuk.co.uk/ltd/rivington-street-holdings-(uk)%7CCompanies in the UK
  6. ↑ "Hero-to-zero RSH may have done too much, too soon." Derek Pain, The Independent , 2 June 2012.
  7. ↑ Comeback for Peter Webb as T1PS review prompts Winnifrith exit. Gavin Lumsden, citywiremoney, 29 May 2012. Retrieved 22 June 2015.
  8. 1 2 "Tom Winnifrith quits". IOM Today, 11 July 2012. Retrieved 22 June 2015.
  9. ↑ "Lib Dems accused of 'whitewash' over racism expulsions". The Independent. 18 December 1993. Retrieved 24 May 2017.
  10. ↑ "Beaufort Securities - alarming email? Panic not the FCA is not shutting it down". Shareprophets.com. 9 September 2017. Retrieved 28 September 2018.
  11. ↑ "Beaufort Securities charged with fraud by US prosecutors". Citywire.co.uk. 2 March 2018. Retrieved 28 September 2018
  12. ↑ "Six Individuals And Four Corporate Defendants Indicted In $50 Million International Securities Fraud And Money Laundering Schemes" Justice.gov. 2 March 2018. Retrieved 28 September 2018
  13. ↑ "FCA kept Beaufort Securities alive for FBI fraud probe" Citywire.co.uk. 9 March 2018. Retrieved 28 September 2018
  14. ↑ "SEC Charges U.K. Brokerage Firm, Investment Manager, CEO, and Others for Manipulative Trading in U.S. Microcap Stocks" sec.gov, 16 March 2018. Retrieved 28 September 2018
  15. ↑ "Share pumping and Picassos: $50m scam that killed a London brokerage" ft.com. 10 March 2018. Retrieved 28 September 2018
  16. ↑ "Rivington Street Holdings – Bedroom Fantasy to Corporate Catastrophe". https://sharetipstersuncovered.wordpress.com/. 6 January 2015. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
  17. ↑ "Why i am voting Labour". shareprophets.com, 3 May 2015. Retrieved 27 November 2018
  18. ↑ https://www.keele.ac.uk/spgs/staff/ranjidevadason/ [ bare URL ]
  19. ↑ "Christopher Booker on My Grandfather". tomwinnifrith.com, 18 August 2013. Retrieved 27 November 2018
  20. ↑ "Christopher Booker – The Thatcher I knew, nearly always right in the end". uk.advfn.com, 28 April 2013. Retrieved 27 November 2018
  21. ↑ "The deaths of my mother and aunt". tomwinnifrith.com, 23 October 2014. Retrieved 27 November 2018
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.