Jon Clarke (Publisher & Editor)EXCLUSIVE By Jon Clarke and Nicola Cowell
IT was exactly the incentive they needed to unload the unwanted timeshare they had owned in Madeira for years.
Promised a buyer for their timeshare – and the chance to earn 10,000 euros in a fabulous cashback scheme – the alarm bells should have started ringing.
But Les and Beryl Simpson, 66, from Eastbourne, ploughed on regardless and signed up to Incentive Leisure’s ‘holiday club’ scheme, the Designer Way Vacation Club, and invested 8000 pounds in the Reclaim share.
“We were told by Incentive that we would be able to claim back a total of £17,000 by 2012 from just that £8,000,” explained Les, 67.
“It sounded like a good deal.”
However, when a year later the timeshare had still not been sold the couple started to get suspicious.
It was then that they started to research the Incentive group and its boss Garry Leigh – who was killed earlier this month in a cycling accident in Marbella.
“I discovered he had been convicted of 11 counts of fraud at Reading Court, so I wrote demanding to know what was happening,” he continued.
But to this day they have heard nothing.
“We’ll never get our £8,000 back now, particularly as Leigh has died, so that is the end of that,” said Les.
Set up by Leigh in 2003, Incentive Leisure is linked to Designer Way Vacation, Compare Your Timeshare, Dreamworks Vacation Club, and many more businesses.
One of Incentive’s ex-employees Lynda Hudd, 54, told the Olive Press how Leigh always seemed to have a smile on his face, despite the fact that he was conning innocent people.
“Obviously, the longer I worked there the more I realised people got scammed, as almost everyone got a call to say they’d won a holiday or something, but had to attend a meeting.”
Curiously, a day after our exclusive story on the death of Leigh last issue, we received a cryptic call from a 952 number based next to the Waterpark in Fuengirola, where Incentive has an office.
The number, it turned out, came from a company called ‘Pro Travel Solutions’, which reportedly has links to Leigh.
When we called nobody could tell us what the company did, nor what it offered.
Eventually we got a call back from someone in admin called ‘Sam’ who demanded to know how we got the number.
We didn’t hear from them again.
Incentive Leisure declined to comment.
Hi after managing to get all our money back through our credit card we have just received a phone call on Thursday last from Anthony Derbyshire from a LOndon based firm and they claim they can get 75% of reclaim money back from the Spanish courts We have to provide our crad details, meet their guy and if visit cancelled they charge us £270.Anybody else been approached??
Margaret.