Accountants are still examining James Middletons Boomf business records

Late last year, James Middleton’s sad marshmallow business Boomf was finally put out of its misery. Boomf had amassed at least a £800,000 in debt, the company hadn’t been paying its bills or its subcontractors for months, and the company lost millions of pounds in investment before it was sold to an Estonian businessman. James lost interest in Boomf as soon as he started his fourth company, which is selling raw dog food. The dog food company is already a financial mess too, and James is racking up hundreds of thousands in debt through poor management. Don’t worry though, he bought a £1.5 million home near mummy and daddy last year. Curious! Anyway, to emphasize James Middleton’s poor management and his repeated business scams, the Mail’s Eden Confidential column has a curious update:

Though still only 35, the Duchess of Cambridge’s brother, James Middleton, has already blazed an adventurous trail through the commercial world, founding three companies. But the Midas touch exhibited by his parents, who’ve made millions from Party Pieces, the business they famously began in their kitchen, has so far stubbornly eluded him.

Regrettably, that’s not all. For I can reveal that just six months after Boomf — the company James founded in 2013 to exploit the market for novelty marshmallows — went bust with accumulated trading losses of almost £2 million, administrators have enlisted legal firm Withers to assist them in investigating ‘a payment made to American Express UK’ of almost £52,000.

The money was handed over on November 24 — just three weeks before Boomf went into administration.

‘We are obliged to review all the information available to us and conduct an initial assessment of whether there are any matters which may lead to recoveries for the benefit of creditors,’ the administrators record in their progress report, published this week.

The American Express payment, they add, was made by Boomf’s chief financial officer, who explained that she had made the payment ‘solely to protect her personal credit position, as she was named on the card’. One of the administrators, Peter Kubik of UHY Hacker Young, tells me that ‘certain payments are allowed’ even as a company heads into administration, particularly if they ‘preserve the value of the business’.

But that was not the case in this instance, adds Kubik, who explains: ‘She [the finance officer] shouldn’t have done it. The creditor should not have received that money and we’re asking for it back.’

The administrators managed to sell Boomf for £300,000.

Middleton was enjoying Wimbledon this week with his wife Alizee Thevenet. ‘This is just a usual part of the administration process that certain payments are looked at,’ he tells me. ‘This is one of them.’

[From The Daily Mail]

There’s something sad about the fact that creditors and investors are still examining Boomf’s business records and trying to figure out just how poorly managed the company was from the start. I have pity for the forensic accountants looking through Boomf’s records. But of course nothing will happen to James. Three failed businesses and a fourth business headed for failure and he’s only 35 years old. I do blame Carole and Mike for some of this – they needed to have a come-to-Jesus conversation with James years ago about how he’s incapable of running a business and he needs to quit pretending.

James and Alizee attended matches at Wimbledon on Monday:

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Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Getty and Instagram.

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