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NYC Lawyer May Bring Class Action Suit Over Ponzi Scheme by British Investor 

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Jared Stamell, an attorney with the New York City-based Stamell and Schager LLP law firm, may bring a class-action lawsuit over a multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme allegedly committed by British investor Renwick Haddow. According to a Crains New York report in January, Haddow is believed to have deliberately misled over 200 investors with Bar Works, a co-working startup founded in 2014 whose premise was to serve as both a bar and an office space, allowing employees to work and drink. 

To make financial restitution to the investors, Stamell said this week he would likely take action against the banks overseeing Bar Works financial transactions, rather than pursuing legal action against the perpetrators. 

As Stamell explained to Crains, the reason for this is that legal action must be taken against someone who can repay the victims in order for a lawsuit to get underway. 

“It’s generally very hard to recoup money from the people who carried out the fraud,” Stamell clarified. 

Due to the controversy, Bar Works two locations in Midtown have been closed, while a landlord, Alexander Brodsky, says eviction proceedings have begun against a third location which has stopped paying rent. 

In a January report, the Real Deal said Haddow had attempted to hide his involvement with Bar Works, billing his Eastern European wife as a co-founder under a pseudonym. Even stranger, Jonathan Black, a British-accented man interviewed by Crain’s in 2016, was suspected of being Haddow himself operating under an assumed name. Bar Works is not the first time Haddow has been suspected of criminal activity, as he is believed to have been involved in various Ponzi schemes in his native Britain.     

Despite initial evasions, the phony identity of Jonathan Black was confirmed by Bar Works publicist Franklin Kinard, who spoke with Crain’s by phone, according to the site. While Kinard initially claimed Black was an employee of the company who had been let go, he later backpedaled, confessing that Black was indeed an alias of Haddow, and that he had only been trying to protect Haddow’s privacy “because Renwick had initially introduced himself to me as Jonathan Black, and I didn’t know if he wanted his real name out there.” 

The Real Deal’s January investigative report noted discrepancies in “Black’s” LinkedIn page, which describes him as a graduate of the Westminster Business School in 1993, though his public profile lists Bar Works as his only work experience, starting in 2015. 

Michael Kapin, an attorney representing 27 Chinese investors who claim to have lost over $3 million in the Ponzi scheme, described the enigmatic Haddow to Crain’s as “a ghost,” saying it is not known whether he is even a real person.  

As of right now, there are more questions than answers, and the mystery remains to be unraveled.

By:  Max Rozwaski 

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