CBD Asylum Director Sentenced Over Loan Fraud
An Insolvency Service prosecution has ended in suspended sentences and director disqualifications for the two men who ran the company that traded as the Hull brand. The convictions concern loans and bankruptcy disclosure, not products.
By Staff, CBD Wire
A director of the company behind the Hull CBD brand CBD Asylum has been sentenced for fraud and money laundering after an Insolvency Service prosecution. The boundary first: the convictions concern borrowing, laundering and a bankruptcy disclosure failure. Nothing in the announcement concerns any product.
What the Insolvency Service announced
Per the Insolvency Service press release published on 28 July, Alex Hope, 41, and Liam Jones, 42, pleaded guilty on the day of their trial at Hull Crown Court in June and were sentenced on 27 July. Hope was a director of A Hope Ltd, a management consultancy, and of Virtutum Limited, which traded as CBD Asylum in Hull; Jones was his co-director at Virtutum.
Hope was convicted of two counts of fraud, one of money laundering, and one of failing to disclose the value of company shares while bankrupt. Jones was convicted of one count of fraud.
The figures are the agency’s, not ours. The release states that in August 2020 Hope applied for a £25,000 Bounce Back Loan declaring a turnover of £100,000, when the company’s accounts showed less than £13,000; that Virtutum obtained a £56,000 loan from a private lender in 2021 on personal guarantees that no litigation was under way; and that funds from both loans moved through a series of accounts and formed part of a €245,825 payment for a house in Puerto Calero, Lanzarote.
Hope received three years’ imprisonment suspended for three years, an eight-year director disqualification and 250 hours of unpaid work. Jones received ten months suspended for eighteen months, a two-year disqualification and 100 hours of unpaid work. The agency says it is seeking to recover the money under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.
What this is, and what it isn’t
This is a company-conduct case. It says nothing about the composition, labelling or listing status of anything the brand sold, and we are not going to let the word “CBD” in a press-release headline do work the evidence does not support. Products of this kind are sold in the UK as food supplements for adults, never as medicines and never as remedies for anything — a frame these proceedings had no occasion to test.
Nor does the release address the company’s present trading position, and we will not assert one unchecked.
For buyers, then, nothing changes and nothing needs to. The checks worth doing last week are worth doing this week: find your exact product on the FSA’s public list, then find the batch report. Our explainer on the 1mg rule and the list sets out both. The full announcement is on GOV.UK.