A deal was reached in March 1983 to sell WLOL to Tarmac ^[6] on the 24th March 1983 together with ROIL providing a Flowen Technology licence for the UK, the estimated cost to Tarmac was circa £600k.   Fully appraised of the deal our bank, Barclays’ of Poole on the 22nd sent off WLOL’s various freehold factory deeds to solicitors for the deal consummation on the 25th  ^[7]. However, on the 24th, Barclays illegally stopped all WLOL’s bank accounts throughout the UK stopping us trading.  Alan Pigdon the manager at Barclays Poole said, “he had no control over the situation, he had been ordered by Head Office to stop the accounts.”

At the meeting on the 25th with Tarmac Industrial Holdings, (TIH), Chairman Peter Woodman and his financial Director Derek Wild told my team they understood Barclays had appointed Richard Stone of Cork Gully Receiver over WLOL, therefore the deal was off as they would deal with Stone.  No such appointment had been made; the accounts were all within the terms of the Facility Letter of the 29th September 1981 ^[8] .Barclays issued a recall notice on 29th March which arrived on 31 March 1983 ^[9] well before the due date for the loan account payment on the 5th April, it being Easter weekend. ^[10]

On the 6th April 1983 Barclays duly appointed Richard Stone of Cork Gully Birmingham, (160 miles from (WLO/ROIL, but only 12 miles from Tarmac), over WLOL.   I carried on with the ROIL’s overseas business and was in Jakarta consummating the deal with Pertamina when a month later Stone was appointed over ROIL, allegedly because the Patents and Trade Mark Flowen was held by the parent company ROIL.  This did not stop Stone coming after me demanding the deposit he thought Pertamina had paid and removing the £9k in the bank. ^[11]    Stone turned away  legitimate offers and within 40 minutes of the withdrawal, by the contrived default of the last interested party, he sold WLOL, the PATENTS and TRADE MARK, ‘FLOWEN’ to Tarmac for £65k, below even the forced sale valuation of the main class 8 industrial factory at Stoke on Trent, plus the Waste Receiving, Transfer and Processing Licences.  Tarmac’s Offer of the 15th August 1983 ^[12] is available for 24 hours because, “of the protracted time these negotiation have so far taken”.   They had originally approached ROIL to buy WLO in 1981/2 so they considered them to be the same negotiations.

Tarmac Group accounts ^[13] show that £610k was provided to TIH for the acquisition of WLOL, which begs the question, was the £545k the sweetener for the fraudsters ?   The acquisition of WLO and FLOWEN had a dramatic affect on the turnover and profitability of the Tarmac subsidiary ‘RECOIL Ltd’ putting it into profit for the first time in its history. ^[14]    Twenty years on and Tarmac still have FLOWEN OIL LTD ^[15], the company formed by them for my technology and intellectual rights.

Having petitioned the Bank of England to complain of their lack of enforcement of the Banking Acts, I was/was not, surprised to note that at the time of the appointment, Andrew Buxton CEO of Barclays, the Chairman of Tarmac and Sir Kenneth Cork of Cork Gully were all Directors of the Bank of England.     

I reported the apparent fraud to West Midland Police Fraud Squad during the mid 1980s’on the basis of an alleged conspiracy between inter alia Barclays, Richard Stone of Cork Gully and Tarmac, They started to investigate.  Stone was involved with the bank and Tarmac in several other dodgy receiverships, such as Canning Engineering. ^[16]   Ironically the West Midland Police Squad was then disbanded, because of internal fraud, so in 1989 I initiated civil actions against Stone and Tarmac but was ruled to be Statute Time Barred.