Banned: Ryan Fraser ran Global Wine Exchange
A serial fraudster who specialised in defrauding wine investors has been banned from acting as a director of a limited company for 12 years.
Ryan Fraser, 33, from St Albans in Hertfordshire, ran Global Wine Exchange. In 2020, I warned against running it, after he overcharged a reader and broke a promise to resell his wine at a profit. I discovered it was little more than a telesales operation, with salespeople expected to make 300 calls a day to potential investors.
The reader who complained was offered a refund if he agreed to try to silence me. And the company told me: “If you publish an article or warning about Global Wine Exchange, we will challenge you legally and we are prepared to take action against you and your newspaper.”
Well, we did publish, but there was no legal recourse and in 2022 the company was closed down by the High Court. Insolvency Service investigators now say the company amassed more than £3m, more than a third of which was pocketed in sales commissions and wages, and it has not been possible to link investors to the wine found in a warehouse.
Fraser has experience in this area. In 2017 he was jailed for three years for conspiring to defraud clients of his company Premier Wine Investment. They invested £362,000 in his business, which police say he spent on trips to Dubai and the US, visits to spas in Bath and Paris, restaurants in Mayfair, designer clothes and renting a luxury flat.
He was also disqualified as a director until 2027, meaning he should never have been in charge of Global Wine Exchange. I suspect this is not the end of the story.