Again in 2020 cost processor ePayments introduced it was the topic of a freeze order.
The freeze order was issued by the FCA, tying up over £100 million in shopper funds. These funds are nonetheless frozen.
Now ePayments has introduced it’s shutting down.
As per ePayments’ September twelfth announcement;
ePayments has begun the method of closing its doorways and entered into an orderly, solvent wind-down.
As you may be conscious, the enterprise has been closed for the previous three years after our regulator (the UK Monetary Conduct Authority (the FCA)) recognized some weaknesses in our monetary crime controls.
Now we have over this era been working arduous to make sure these are as much as the required normal, however in these extraordinarily difficult and unprecedented world financial situations, and with the enterprise being restricted for such an prolonged interval we are able to not maintain the enterprise to construct again to what the FCA require and a ‘enterprise as common’ state.
In follow, which means that we is not going to return to full operations and can now focus solely on offering clients with refunds and dealing via the method of closing your accounts as we shut down the enterprise.
Your funds with us stay in safeguarded accounts. The FCA is conscious of our resolution and this communication.
In lieu of it closing down, ePayments has directed shoppers to request refunds.
Following makes an attempt to legitimize the enterprise all through 2020 and 2021, ePayments did really reopen in December 2021.
Six months later the writing is on the wall: With out cash laundering and legal shoppers engaged in criminality, evidently ePayments isn’t viable.
The fascinating tie between ePayments and MLM is OneCoin.
As explored in BehindMLM’s preliminary protection of the freeze order, Robert Courtneidge (proper) was Director of ePayments Techniques.
Previous to being appointed to ePayments, Courtneidge was World Head of Playing cards and Funds for the legislation agency Locke Lord.
In January 2018 Courtneidge left Locke Lord to signal on as CEO of Moorwand, one other cost processor.
Courtneidge’s appointment as an ePayments Techniques Director happened six months later in July.
Locke Lord in the meantime, is similar legislation agency who within the UK counted OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova as a shopper.
Robert Courtneidge labored carefully with Mark Scott to launder OneCoin funds:
When the Monetary Occasions approached Courtneidge for remark on the ePayments freeze, he instructed them he “was not legally in a position to touch upon the corporate”.
Courtneidge resigned from ePayments on February seventeenth, 2020 – six days after the FCA freeze took impact. Since March 2020, Courtneidge refers to himself as an “Unbiased Funds Trade Advisor”.
This was my conclusion on the FCA ePayments freeze, as printed in 2020;
To ensure that Courtneidge to be appointed a non-executive Director of ePayments Techniques in January 2018, presumably there needed to have been some kind of working relationship.
Did that relationship contain laundering huge quantities of cash for Ruja Ignatova, in Courtneidge’s capability as Locke Lord’s World Head of Playing cards and Funds, via ePayments Techniques?
And is that behind the FCA now shutting down ePayments Techniques indefinitely over cash laundering considerations?
Past initiating an asset freeze and successfully severing ePayments enterprise operations in 2020, the FCA has taken no additional motion – at the least not publicly.
Whereas we all know it was initiated as a consequence of unlawful conduct, particular particulars behind the FCA’s ePayments freeze stay unknown.
