Supposed financial saviour Christopher Holmes (above) refused to talk to us when we met him this week.
Which is a pity, because we wanted to ask him if he is able to afford his ?865,000 house because he gets other people chucked out of theirs.
His firms Consolidated Finance and Bankruptcy Protection Fund offer what look like lifelines, saying they can stop people who have been made bankrupt from being repossessed.
It's a big market, with 6,600 bankruptcies recorded from January to March this year alone.
"The Bankruptcy Protection Fund was set up to prevent people from losing their home as a result of bankruptcy," claims the firm, run from Manchester by 48-year-old Holmes.
"You will be able to keep all your assets including your house and your car."
The reality can be dreadfully different, as the Court of Appeal has laid bare.
It heard how Holmes's firms wanted to repossess the home of Tracy Collins of Hornchurch, Essex, who had been made bankrupt owing ?13,500.
She was then cold-called by ?Consolidated Finance which leant her enough to pay her debts and the bankruptcy was annulled.
But the condition was that she ?remortgaged her home and she now faced having to repay Consolidated.
Its shocking interest of 4% per month kicked in and her debt to Consolidated escalated to more than ?100,000, which she couldn't pay.
Because her loan from Consolidated was secured against her house, the firm went to court to get possession.
At first it succeeded, and also got permission to take the homes from three other "customers" who ended up owing far more to Consolidated than they ever owed in bankruptcy.
Thankfully the Court of Appeal has now overturned that judgment. Judge Sir Stanley Burnton said that the companies charged "extraordinarily high" interest rates to vulnerable customers.
Speaking of the predicament of Tracy Collins, he said that if she had been unable to pay the "relatively modest" sum that resulted in her bankruptcy then "the chances were that she would be unable to refinance the much greater sums that would be due to the ?companies, as indeed happened."
The consequence for Tracy and husband Innes: "They were likely to lose their home."
Judge Burnton added: "This was the very result that, according to the companies' literature, entering into the ?agreements with them would avoid."
He also had scathing words for Lupton Fawcett, the lawyers that Holmes's firms introduced to its customers.
He said: "It must, and certainly should, have been obvious to them the ?transactions with Mr and Mrs Collins were manifestly to their disadvantage.
"Mrs Collins was their client. I raise the question whether in such circumstances a solicitor can properly avoid a duty to advise his client by excluding that duty from his retainer, as Lupton Fawcett sought to do."
Of course she could have got proper advice elsewhere, though the judge pointed out that a bankrupt person might not be able to afford a second set of solicitors.
Lupton Fawcett - its mission statement says it likes "raising a few eyebrows" - said: "We are actively reviewing our historic role in these matters and any appropriate lessons will be acted upon."
Holmes would not comment when we met him as he left his home in Hale, Cheshire, where a Porsche Cayenne and Porsche Boxster were parked in the driveway.
His lawyers, Mishcon de Reya, said that the companies were appealing the Court of Appeal's decision. So for the likes of Tracy Collins and the other three sets of homeowners, the nightmare goes on.
The full Court of Appeal judgment can be found here. I would urge anyone thinking of doing business with Consolidated Finance or Bankruptcy Protection Fund to read it, especially paragraphs 55 to 59.
The two firms along with a third one, Alpha Mortgages Manchester Ltd, were in 2010 ordered by the Office of Fair Trading to improve their business practices. An investigation by the OFT found that they "had not been transparent in their dealings with customers and failed to adequately outline the risks involved". More here.
Source: http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/investigations/2013/05/bankruptcy-protection-fund-doe.html
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