As Secretary of State for Business, our Group saw Vince Cable as central to our case, not only because of his role in Government, but also for his comments on the lack of care taken by Deloitte on several administrations, particularly Comet PLC, which has resulted in a £44 million bill to the UK taxpayer, full article here.

Fortunately, we had two members within our group that were constituents in Cable's Twickenham constituency. One wrote directly to him expressing concerns about the Hibu administration, and another of our members met him at his office.

Before the meeting, our member sent Cable the letter below as a chase up to a previously ignored contact.

Dear Dr. Cable,

I contacted you on the 28th October regarding my shareholding in Hibu. You are already familiar with the Hibu case. You may be aware that private investors in Hibu PLC. formed a shareholders group (HSG) and without any institutional support perhaps for the first time in UK corporate history, we managed to force a company of this size to call an EGM to answer shareholders questions. HSG, that I am a member of, have worked tirelessly for months with the nominees to secure an EGM for 04 December 2013 to hold the Hibu board accountable for colluding with the lenders on a "loan to own" strategy.

It is with great regret I inform you that the Hibu directors have put the holding company into administration to avoid answering shareholders questions at the EGM. Their lawyers HSF wrote a very threatening and unprofessional letter to HSG and our lawyer yesterday. I have attached a copy of today's announcement and the HSF letter for your perusal. Dr. Cable I absolutely trusted the very positive statements made by this company's directors and their digital strategy - a company that is still generating £1.3 billion a year and spending £60 million on an advertising campaign.

Unfortunately, I am facing a loss of a life changing amount of £xxxxxx invested in this company. Please do not consider me a disgruntled shareholder, this situation has been engineered through a collusion between the directors and lenders to get rid of the shareholders. I appeal for your intervention in this matter and would like to meet you as soon as possible. I shall be truly grateful for your prompt attention in this matter. The directors of this company have left me financially destitute, ruined my health, but worse of all, split my family and left my children and wife without a home to call their own! 

Interestingly for a one to one meeting with one of his constituents, When Cable met the constituent that had sent the above communication, Cable had two lawyers present at the meeting. Why would the Business Secretary need legal representation at a meeting with one of his constituents?  Cable just suggested that we take legal action if it was "causing us concern" Given Dr Cable's slamming of Deloitte in the press, we were surprised not to have received any more help from him, apart from advising us to commence legal proceedings (which our member had advised that we were not in a position to do, given the severe losses the hibu administration had caused our members) Several weeks later our member received the below letter from Cable's office.

At the time of writing, some EIGHT years later, Cable has not made any reply, nor has Jo Swinson at the BIS. Again, this highlights the absolute mockery that MPs make of their constituents, promising to take matters further and report back, and then actually doing neither.

So why did Cable take no action, despite his stance against Deloitte's slapdash administration procedures on previous PLC administrations? Given the fact that so many of our contacts had ground to a halt in assisting us we decided to do some research and find out why Cable did not want to help our group, when his role as Secretary of State for Business meant he could and should help us?, he had even made a formal complaint to the ICAEW on Deloitte's administration of Comet PLC. We had informed the press that we had looked for help from Vince Cable well in advance of the EGM as can be seen in this press report.

There had to be a reason for this....

We looked at some of Cable's connections. Cable had been instructing a Richard Hooper to do some work for him in the years preceding the hibu administration, such as investigating a digital copyrights exchange, which can be seen here. Hooper was also tasked with a major project directly by Cable in his role as Business Secretary, the privatisation of the Royal Mail. In fact, the feasibility study was named the Hooper Report. Clearly, Cable worked closely with and trusted Hooper, working together on such a huge project. (Un)Surprisingly, Hooper had connections to our case...

He was the Senior Non-Executive Director at Yell/Hibu! That made sense now, despite our case being handled by Deloitte in an even more unorganised and slapdash manner, ignoring a huge number of major failings way more than the administration of Comet PLC, Cable was not interested as he did not want to implicate Hooper in any wrongdoings.

Convince us otherwise, Dr Cable.

Again, very unsurprisingly, a former Non-Executive Director at the Royal Mail Group was none other than Bob Wigley.