what up guys Adrian from YouMotorcycle and today's big front-page story on
YouMotorcycle.com is that Norton motorcycles has once again gone bankrupt
but not only that this current instance of Norton motorcycles because it's been
owned by ten different people or companies over the last 100 years this
current instance of Norton motorcycles it seems like this whole time it's just
really been a scam to take motorcyclist's money so that's what we'll be talking about
today: Norton motorcycles, a bit of their history, but mostly what's been happening
the last 10 to 12 years and why people suspect that this whole last 10 years in
Norton has been nothing more than a big cash grab. So getting right into it I got
the article loaded up here and yeah the Norton motorcycle company it was originally
founded over 120 years ago in 1898 by a guy whose last name was you guessed it
his last name was Norton and at the time Norton was actually pretty
successful they were known for good quality stuff good race stuff along with
Triumph which makes this bike behind me. It was always like one of the big
powerhouse British motorcycle companies that everybody wanted to have they
managed to kind of stave off competition from the Japanese for pretty well until
their parent company a parent company AMC went bankrupt and ever since that
happened in the 60s it just seems like there's been this kind of constant flow
of people buying up Norton's assets kind of going somewhere with it and then
it's sort of falling apart or people buying it just to flip it. My favorite
was actually, there was a Canadian guy who owned Norton and his name was Nelson Skalbania
and he was known for flipping sports teams he was known for
flipping real estate basically his idea was buy low sell high and rinse, wash, repeat.
Skalbania was the first person to ever sign Wayne Gretzky so if you
know hockey know who that is and he was also convicted of criminal fraud. It
wasn't related to Norton but it still shows you the kind of weasel
type character that we're dealing with here. After that Norton went to America
where was picked up by a couple good dudes from out of Oregon who I honestly
believe these guys they were led by a Kenny Dreer. I think they had the best
of intentions. I'll link to my article where I have the full descriptions, I'm trying to
summarize it really quickly to make it a quick watch for you guys here. All the
story's in there. But in the end at least you know Kenny's team was good enough
that anybody who put money down for a Norton bike but they couldn't deliver on
those people all got their money back in full so that's good and then comes this
guy that I'll zoom in on this picture so you can see us face I mean here's a guy
who just looks guilty. His name is Stuart Garner.
and Stuart Garner he's been described as a high school dropout who got a job as a
gatekeeper at a prep school and the prep school was described as "a great place to
study upper class twits and learn how easy they were to scam." I don't know
anything for sure here but I'm gonna kind of tell you when Stuart Garner this
guy went to purchase Norton he offered as collateral to a loan (cause he needed to find
several different ways to get money) he had some from here some from
there so that all of it would add up to enough that he could purchase Norton.
Two of the ways that he got money to purchase Norton were both really shady
in my opinion the first way is he offered up a company that he owned as
collateral, so if I default on my loan you can have this company. The thing is he
didn't actually own the whole company he was only a 50% owner of the company
but he offered the entire company up as collateral which is just it's crazy and
that's not something you're supposed to do to your partners who knows how he
even got away with it that was crazy thing number one of how
he got money. Crazy thing number two of how he got the money to purchase Norton
in fact I got some articles linking to it I don't want to get too too into the
weeds but basically he was the recipient of money that you could say kind of came
from a scam and what I mean by that is the two guys who were kind of associates
who set him up with this million pound loan they were actually arrested and
convicted of fraud. Now there was no dirt ever found on Stuart Garner but I mean
you have to wonder if two of his buddies are lending him money and those
two guys are being locked up how squeaky-clean is his Garner guy
that he had no idea that something wrong or something fishy was happening right?
Anyway so that's how Stuart Gardner had got to have enough money to purchase
Norton in first place. The guy seems like he's trying to get all this money
coming in from all these different places and just what the heck is he
spending it on? Well I want to take you guys back in time to a little castle
called Versailles. Versailles is where the kings of France from Louis XIV a.k.a.
Louis Bourbon I lived, down to Louis XVI which was his grandson.
When the french revolution kicked off and they started trying to find all the
monarchy and cut off all their heads. So all the French monarchs they had to
leave France and go somewhere safe because all the people were uprising.
They wanted to kill all the monarchs. So where did the monarchy, where the royal family go to live?
The royal family went to go and live in a place called Donnington Hall.
Donington Hall in the UK is the same place that Stuart Garner purchased with
the money that was raised from Norton. This is crazy because the money he was
getting was from the pension fund of seniors. So old people in the UK that had
these pension funds it was the part of the whole retirement plan and they put
that money to wards they put their pension funds into Norton and what
Garner thought was the best thing for Norton to do was to buy going to Hall
which was a massive probably here's a picture of it massive beautiful mansion
it's called the mansion let's be real it's more like a mini castle and he
wanted Donington Hall to be the headquarters of Norton. In reality
Donnington Hall was basically, yes it was the headquarters of Norton but it was also
his own personal private castle is what it really was. He put the money from
these pension areas not into research and development not into you know making
sure he was paying his suppliers he put it into buying a property fit for Kings
essentially. Let me ask you this: why would any motorcycle company need to
purchase an aston martin unless it was because their owner wanted to be driving
around in an aston martin? let me ask you this: why would any motorcycle company
purchase not one not two not three not four not five but six Aston Martin's?
That's right the Stewart Garner used the money that was supposed to go to
Norton motorcycles to buy himself probably the biggest house he could get
himself into, and not one but six Aston Martin's. I've lost track of how
many red flags we are at with this whole Norton motorcycles situation but it's
getting pretty crazy. That's not even the worst thing though. The worst thing is
that there's a bit of a pyramid scheme like a Ponzi scheme going on here and
that is, sure Norton did produce several hundred motorcycles under Garner's
ownership but for those several hundred that they produced there are hundreds
more if not thousands more of people who had put deposits down and some had even
paid in full for motorcycles that were never produced and never received.
In the case of Norton we actually had reports that, check out this picture I'm
gonna just show it in here, this is a tweet from guy named John Hamilton who
allegedly bought a Norton so he brought it back to the factory Donnington Hall
head office whatever to have it paint corrected and Norton was so bad at
paying their suppliers that the supplier stopped giving them the parts they
needed to finish the bikes so when a warranty bike came in they would just
take parts off of the warranty bike to finish new bikes to send those new bikes
out to get paid for the new bikes. Wow! I've not heard of any other motorcycle
company or any legitimate business doing anything like this ever before, this
is absolutely crazy. So what comes next? I mean there's speculation that it's it's
rough. There's speculation that Garner may have actually sold certain intellectual
properties that were associated with Norton to a Chinese company. If that's
the case then it means that we could have Chinese made Norton clones out
there in the future which I think severely cheapens the Norton brand and
the demand for the Norton brand but the real unfortunate thing here isn't
that the Norton brand may never come back or people may never want it or the
next generation of Norton's may just be these Chinese things, the real sin here
is that a lot of seniors were shafted out of their pensions, money that they
probably will never get back, and that a lot of motorcyclists who put deposits on
bikes and who put in some cases paid in full for bikes they're never gonna
receive their bikes they're never gonna get their money back. There is an
ombudsman who's been looking into all of this who's gonna be apparently going
after Garner that's if they can find them. Speculation is that Garner owns or
at least did own a game ranch down in South Africa where it's believed he's
stashed away millions of Norton money down there. Will he be brought
to justice if he is in fact guilty of all the stuff that it seems like he's
guilty of? Maybe hopefully maybe not. Sure the Norton brand will in some variation some
form be coming back maybe even by the Chinese. This is definitely another sad
chapter in the Norton story. If you guys found this video interesting please give
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you guys so much for your time that's all folks
ride safe peace