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.
We’ve over this era been working exhausting 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 now not maintain the enterprise to construct again to what the FCA require and a ‘enterprise as regular’ state.
In apply, which means we is not going to return to full operations and can now focus completely on offering clients with refunds and dealing by means of 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 truly reopen in December 2021.
Six months later the writing is on the wall: With out cash laundering and felony 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 Programs.
Previous to being appointed to ePayments, Courtneidge was World Head of Playing cards and Funds for the regulation 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 Programs Director came about six months later in July.
Locke Lord in the meantime, is similar regulation agency who within the UK counted OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova as a shopper.
Robert Courtneidge labored intently with Mark Scott to launder OneCoin funds:
When the Monetary Instances approached Courtneidge for remark on the ePayments freeze, he advised them he “was not legally capable of 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 Business Advisor”.
This was my conclusion on the FCA ePayments freeze, as revealed in 2020;
To ensure that Courtneidge to be appointed a non-executive Director of ePayments Programs in January 2018, presumably there needed to have been some form 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, by means of ePayments Programs?
And is that behind the FCA now shutting down ePayments Programs indefinitely over cash laundering issues?
Past initiating an asset freeze and successfully severing ePayments enterprise operations in 2020, the FCA has taken no additional motion – at the very least not publicly.
Whereas we all know it was initiated attributable to unlawful conduct, particular particulars behind the FCA’s ePayments freeze stay unknown.
