They are the three queens of PPI, the owners of giant claims companies that have banked hundreds of millions of pounds in fees from the PPI saga. But none of them appears in newspaper rich lists, and little is known about their vast fortunes.
Lisa O’Neill, at 39 the youngest of the PPI multimillionaires, is listed as the 100% owner of Warrington-based Gladstone Brookes, which boasts on its website that it has recovered more than £1bn for customers. The company earns a 20% cut from every PPI payment (this used to be more, when fees were higher), which adds up to a fees bonanza worth at least £200m.
The second-biggest PPI claims company is The Claims Guys, which says it has obtained more than £900m in payouts for clients since 2009. It is run by Helen Dwyer, 49, named at Companies House as holding 75% or more of its shares. Its accounts for the year to June 2018 reveal profits of £45m on a turnover of £115m in 2018, and it paid dividends totalling £33.9m. Given Dwyer’s 75% control, that suggests she earned at least £25m in that year alone.
Joy Chorlton, 64, is the third in the trio of female PPI multimillionaires. Her company, We Fight Any Claim, says it has won £500m in payouts for mis-sold PPI, and is best known for an advertising campaign fronted by John Cleese.
Chorlton is listed at Companies House as the “ultimate controlling party due to her 100% shareholding in the company”.
Chorlton heads a family with a controversial financial past. She was a director of Yes Loans, a company founded by her late husband, Keith, which encouraged customers to take out expensive short-term payday loans.
Yes Loans grew into one of the biggest loan brokerages in the UK, handling 50,000 loans a month, enjoying a profit margin of more than 50% and paying millions of pounds a year in dividends.
But in March 2012 – after Joy Chorlton had resigned as director but while it was under the control of her son, Simon – the Office of Fair Trading revoked Yes Loans’s licence to lend. It said it had engaged in “deceitful and oppressive business practices” and was unfit to hold a consumer credit licence.
We Fight Any Claim now operates out of Cradoc House in Bridgend, Wales, the building that was the headquarters of Yes Loans in its heyday. Simon Chorlton was a director of We Fight Any Claim for 10 years, but according to Companies House documents, he resigned recently, in May 2019. Joy Chorlton also resigned as a director, in November 2017. In a statement, the company said Joy Chorlton has “nothing to do with the day-to-day running” of We Fight Any Claim but remains its 100% shareholder.
Lisa O’Neill’s joint director at Gladstone Brookes, Anthony Chorlton (no relation to Simon Chorlton), also has a colourful past. He previously worked at Avalon Solicitors, a firm that made huge profits from fees charged to miners seeking compensation from the government for a range of heart and respiratory diseases.
In 2006 he was named by The Lawyer magazine as one of two equity partners in Avalon Solicitors, also based in Warrington, which in 2005-06 earned £21.2m in fees and made a net profit of £15.5m – a margin of 73%. It is understood that Chorlton’s partner, Andrew Nulty, took around £13m, while Chorlton himself earned around £2.5m, dwarfing the earnings of most lawyers in the UK’s top 100 firms that year.
In 2009, Nulty was struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal after it found that he had taken fees he was not entitled to. Chorlton was not subject to disciplinary action.
Nulty’s brother, Martin, was named in Companies House documents as a “person with significant control” at Churchill Sloan, another PPI company where Anthony Chorlton is a director along with, until recently, O’Neill.
Meanwhile O’Neill has stepped down as the director and secretary of Gladstone Brookes, although in a statement, Gladstone Brookes said she remained 100% owner of the company. It added: “We are proud of the work that we have done and the fact that our extensive multimedia campaigns have encouraged people to reclaim their PPI premiums.”
