Another post on the thread on 30 April 2011 accused Fleming of “deleting Facebook posts on a daily basis from drivers who have paid the best part of £8,000 to enter the scholarship but not had much else from the payment”.
Days later, another user shared screenshots from Facebook that seemingly confirmed this, with at least four drivers who had paid the exorbitant entry fee demanding to know why Fleming had not responded to them. The user claimed the drivers’ complaints were deleted after his screenshot. Later that day, another message on the thread said Fleming had been reported to trading standards and the police for fraud.
And a comment on a Facebook post from 2008, several years before the posts on the TenTenths GPS thread, described an offer of a free shootout as “the biggest scam ever”. The poster said the racetrack where the trials were supposedly taking place had no knowledge of Fleming’s F1 Shootout venture.
Fleming denied allegations that GPS was a scam, telling openDemocracy: “I ran it properly in year one and things went wrong in year two. That’s not a scam. A scam is setting it up and ripping people off in year one and running off with the money.”
He added: “Year 1: success. Year 2: failed and lost my house.”
Fleming also hit out at those accusing the business of being a scam. He said: “I had people making malicious complaints from the beginning saying it was a scam when it clearly wasn’t.
“There will always be people like that but it affects credibility and confidence in your project when there is nothing wrong.”
In 2014, Motorsports ETC Limited, was dissolved. The shootouts stopped around the same time, although it is not clear whether these were being run through Motorsports ETC or another of Fleming’s firms.
Fleming told openDemocracy he had run GPS “to the best of my ability”, adding that he had “had some very bad luck and a number of people who let me down and broke contracts which I could not afford to challenge legally”.
He continued: “The Official Receiver (OR) was happy that I had done everything I could to run the business properly. From June 2011 I was not allowed to speak to any customers as it was in the OR’s hands.
“When I have an idea for a business I usually register the domain name and create a company at the same time as I’m enthusiastic. All but a couple have ever actually traded.”
Fleming also said that he has filed accounts in the past, although openDemocracy was not able to find these on the Companies House website.
Pandemic conspiracies
Fleming’s activities from 2014 until the beginning of the pandemic are unknown. In 2020, he seems to have become interested in conspiracy theories, founding the Covid19 Assembly, which spread doubt on the science behind the government restrictions, and the Together Declaration, a pressure group formed to resist lockdowns, digital ID and other supposed government interference.
The Together Declaration is still active and taking donations but lacks any official records, meaning its funding is equally opaque.
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