Patrimony · Restricted access
Before this door opens, the law asks who you are.
The families and institutions this practice serves are not named here, and never will be.
Nothing on this website is an offer, a recommendation, or a view on the merits of any investment. To the extent that any part of it is an invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity within the meaning of section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, it is directed only at the persons described below, and it must not be acted on by anyone else. The four paragraphs that follow are short, they are the law, and they are the reason this door is shut.
Under section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, a firm that is not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority must not communicate an invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity unless an exemption applies. Contravention is a criminal offence under section 25, and under section 30 an agreement that results from an unlawful communication may be unenforceable against the person who received it. Those consequences fall on the communicator. That is why this firm, and not you, polices this door.
This room relies on the exemptions in the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005. Article 19 admits investment professionals: authorised and exempt persons, and persons whose ordinary activities involve carrying on activity of the kind this room describes, for the purposes of a business. Article 49 admits high net worth companies, unincorporated associations and trusts that meet the thresholds the Order sets. A family office ordinarily enters through the vehicle it operates: where that company or trust meets the Article 49 thresholds, it may pass; a private individual does not pass by standing behind it. The conditions of both Articles require proper systems and procedures to keep this material from being acted on by anyone else, and this gate, together with the declarations it takes and the correction protocol beneath, is how those systems are kept.
Then this room is not directed at you. The protections the law builds for retail investors exist precisely so that material of this kind does not reach them. A declaration made in words you know to be untrue is a misrepresentation: English law allows the party who relied on it to set aside what followed from it, and this firm will use that right, including to refuse any dealing that began at this door. You would stand outside every protection the regime built for you, by your own hand. We ask you instead, plainly and with respect, to go no further.
The categories above are creatures of United Kingdom law. No foreign equivalence exists and none is claimed: your own country's law decides what may lawfully be put in front of you and what you may act upon, and a number of jurisdictions restrict their residents from acting on foreign material of this kind. By proceeding, you confirm that you may lawfully do so under the law of your place of residence. That confirmation, and that responsibility, are yours alone.
Now tell us who you are. We will hold you to it exactly as far as the law does.
Then we must ask you to stop here, and we ask it with respect.
The rules that close this room to private individuals exist for their protection, and we keep them to the letter. Nothing you have seen on this page is an invitation to engage in investment activity. If your family maintains an office or retains professional advisers, they are welcome to read this room and to write on your behalf. If you answered in error, write to the firm at its registered address, marked Patrimony, and say so: the correction is made in writing, not by a second click, because the record of who passed this gate is part of how the gate is kept.
By answering, you make a formal representation of your own legal status, on which this firm relies as its grounds for opening this room. The duty under section 21 is ours and it stays ours: your declaration does not move it, and was never asked in order to move it. What a false declaration does is different: it is a misrepresentation, yours to answer for, on which this firm will rely. The answer is held in your browser and transmitted nowhere: this site collects nothing.
Patrimony · The lines
The lines we drew before you arrived.
Every serious family asks a firm two questions. Who are you is the first, and registers answer it. What stops you is the second, and most firms answer it in adjectives. Here are our stops, in writing, in public, drawn before we ever knew your name, so that you never have to wonder whether they were drawn for your benefit or after your arrival.
01 · The six lines
The negative position
Six lines. None of them moves.
- 01 No merits advice Whether your family should enter any investment is decided by you, on the regulated institution's own advice and your own advisers'. When you ask us for a view on merits, we decline and recommend a regulated adviser of your own, every time, and the exchange goes in the file. The stopping is not modesty; it is the architecture that keeps every protection you have intact.
- 02 Nothing undisclosed Before work begins, in writing, you are told every advantage this firm stands to receive from any party in connection with the engagement: from whom, on what event, and on what basis, including anything from the institution across the table. It is restated in the terms that govern the work. This is the oldest rule of honest intermediation, it is the rule the law itself rewards, and it has no exceptions here.
- 03 No custody, no pooling, no management Nothing of yours passes through our hands: not capital, not title, not authority over either. Whatever moves, moves through regulated channels under a regulated institution's regime.
- 04 No approach unrecorded Who contacted whom is recorded in writing from the first letter. In several jurisdictions that fact is decisive of what is lawful, and our record protects you exactly as much as it protects us.
- 05 No jurisdiction unread The law of your residence is established before an engagement exists, in the written screen at where you live. Where the answer is not clean, the engagement does not begin.
- 06 The wall Nothing of your affairs appears on any surface of this firm, in any form, at any time, whatever the outcome of an engagement. The families are not named. That is the practice.
02 · Asked flatly
The diligence answers
The questions your officers will ask, answered before they ask.
No, and we do not hold ourselves out as such. Whether any given engagement requires authorisation, and on what basis it does not, is settled with United Kingdom counsel before that engagement begins, and recorded in its file. The institution across the table is regulated in full by its own authority, and where any engagement requires a regulated service on your side, it comes from your own regulated advisers, working beside us.
Never. No custody, no pooling, no management, no authority over movement. The line is structural, not contractual.
On its side of the table, the regulated institution, under its own conduct rules. On your side, your own advisers. We carry the file and the process, and we stop exactly there.
England and Wales, stated in every engagement's written terms, with the registered particulars in the counterparty file and the registers to check them against at verification.
Yes, and in writing. The two pages above are the short form; the long form is answered engagement by engagement, with sources cited so your officers verify rather than trust.
03 · Provenance
Expect the questions
Serious rooms ask where wealth came from.
Every regulated institution your capital will meet operates under strict provenance-of-funds regimes, and the seriousness of those questions is a feature of the table, not an insult at it. Files we prepare anticipate the questions before they are asked: the history of the holding, the record of its movement, the documents that carry both. A family that arrives with provenance already answered negotiates from a different chair.
The wall protects your privacy from the market. It never hides you from the law.