The mystery invoice and an expensive law firm: The Eldonian saga comes to court

Anthony McGann Jr is on the phone. It’s been a long time coming. In the three years since I started reporting on the Eldonian Village in north Liverpool I’ve never to this day heard McGann Jr’s voice. I hadn’t even seen him in person until a few weeks ago, in court. Right now, he’s sat in a van in London, visiting for work. He says it’s chucking it down. I’m sitting in an office up north. It’s also chucking it down. McGann Jr wants to offer me a few words of career advice. They follow an email I sent him earlier that week, about a follow-up story I’m doing on the Eldonian Village. Maybe even the final story. But who knows with Anthony McGann Jr. 

“Your original approach to me and my family was with a fucking big sledgehammer,” he says, referring to The Post’s original Eldonian Village reporting in January 2023. “And you don’t have the respect to carry it. But I’m saying that as an older man so maybe you’ll listen to me,” he adds, reminding me of his successful career as the founder of Wolfslair, a Mixed Martial Arts gym which achieved global success in the early 2000s.

McGann is clear about one thing: the story as it’s been told up to now is full of falsehoods. “You chose to do research in a particular vein and, like most people, you got it wrong,” he tells me, later adding: “All this has been generated after my Dad died. Everyone waited until he died, he was an OBE and he died with the same amount of worry he was born with. He was a pious man and he’s basically been shit on by the whole world afterwards.” 

Sadly, McGann Jr doesn’t have high hopes for this new piece, either. He’s sent me over a list of responses to various questions but he suspects our reporting will be misleading.  “I’m sure it’s going to have inflammatory stuff in again because that seems to be the style of The Post,” he says, before weighing up a few words of nuance about the differing approaches of the Post’s reporters. “Albeit [...] In the early days you were a little bit mad like, but that Abi one, she’s round the fucking bend that girl”.

A King’s ransom 

Rewind to December 2022. The Post was preparing to publish its first article about Eldonian Village. As per journalistic practice, I submitted an extensive series of questions for Anthony McGann Jr to respond to. It was McGann Jr’s father and namesake, Anthony McGann Sr, who built the Eldonian community in the 1980s, as a response to slum clearances in Liverpool at the time. The premise was quasi-utopian: all the residents putting into one pot to pay for the running of shared assets, like the nursery and the bowling green. These days, the residents are mostly elderly. 

But with McGann Sr in ill health in his later years, his son had returned to the village to  assist his father in its running. Then, in 2021, two anonymous letters dropped through the door of every Eldonian resident alleging a series of mysterious asset transfers; plots of land from the village’s various charities and companies were being passed into the care of offshore Caribbean companies. McGann Jr has always denied his involvement in these transfers, pointing out that he has never been a named director of any of the relevant companies. To date, we cannot know for sure who is in control of the companies that now own the land.

By the time we were ready to publish a piece examining the sales, the BBC were simultaneously preparing an audio documentary on the same topic. On the evening of 5 December 2022, I received my first email from the elite law firm, Mishcon de Reya, whose client list includes the current King of England, warning us to hold fire on publication. 

The letters we received from Mishcon de Reya did not list Anthony McGann Jr as their client though. Rather, they were addressed to us from ‘The Eldonian’. Mishcon said they were representing the village’s charity and its housing association, acting as one. McGann Jr has since said this was a “minor administrative error,” and that Mishcon were instructed on behalf of the charity alone.

Around the same time, McGann Jr’s solicitors, a humbler Liverpool outfit called Mark Jones and Partners, also got in touch. They said they would be representing McGann Jr personally and told us their client was not placed to answer Eldonian-related questions, but they were aware the charity and housing association were separately in the process of instructing Mishcon de Reya. 

But in reality, it was Anthony McGann Jr who had instructed Mishcon de Reya personally, as court proceedings revealed. The Post has seen an internal Mishcon de Reya document entitled ‘Fee Update’ listing all of the charges incurred for their work on Eldonian-related matters.  The first item listed by Mishcon's Emma Wollcott on 2 December 2022 begins: “Attend to call from Anthony with background to matter”. That call alone cost McGann Jr £1,040. 

It was also McGann on a call with senior Mishcon staff preparing responses to The Post and BBC on 5 December, and again the following day to discuss what steps to take following the publication of the BBC’s audio documentary. On this call he was joined by 46-year-old Gavin Sterritt, who was acting as a trustee of the charity alongside his primary work: as an MMA fighter nicknamed ‘the War Horse’.

In total, McGann Jr spent £14,400 fighting The Post and the BBC — in vain as both stories were ultimately published. The question of whose money he was spending, his or the charity’s, is key to this story. McGann Jr would later claim he was owed all of this money back from the Eldonian Community Trust. Not only that, but he would later attempt to have the charity wound up if it was unable to pay him back those legal fees. But more on that to follow.

Danger in the manger

After the publication of the BBC’s story, followed by ours a month later, the febrile atmosphere in the Eldonian Village worsened. The new CEO of the housing association quit in mysterious circumstances in 2023, after which a rumour spread that a threatening note had been left on his car. The Christmas Nativity was also smashed to pieces in the middle of the night by unknown assailants. Brian Jones, 68, who put the nativity together every year, was one of the most outspoken voices about the land transfers. He saw it as a warning.

All the while, news of the land disposals was gathering pace: in March that year The Sunday Times ran a long piece further shining a light on what The Post had reported. Then, in 2024, the Charity Commission launched a statutory inquiry into the Eldonian Community Trust charity, its most serious form of regulatory engagement. 

In an email to The Post, McGann Jr pointed out that the Charity Commission made no findings relating to the land transfers  — uncovering no wrongdoing by trustees. He sees this as evidence that the information about land transfers in our stories and the anonymous letters has been “demonstrated to be inaccurate and misleading”.

The Commission found that none of the trustees who had been in control of the Eldonian Community Trust charity, people like Gavin ‘the War Horse’ Sterritt, or Jack McGann (Anthony’s son, also an MMA fighter using the nom de guerre ‘The Pilgrim’), had never been legitimately appointed. Nor had the charity been holding any Annual General Meetings or transparent elections — meaning there was essentially no lawful oversight. In response, the Commission removed them all from the register of charities.

The charity, which had been controlled by associates of the McGann family since it was founded, and which was at the centre of what had become a nationally-reported story about offshored land, would finally fall into new hands. That said, the village’s housing association was still being run by McGann Jr’s long-time friend Lee Gwynn, a former nightclub bouncer whose family ran a series of strip clubs. The residents of the village have long-since been calling on the Regulator for Social Housing to take action. 

On 21 March this year, a large group of people piled into a church in north Liverpool. They had gathered for the first Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Eldonian Community Trust charity in years. About 70 people showed up, sat on the church pews clutching slips of paper they would post into a box sat on a pop-up table. After the meeting concluded, a new set of charity trustees had been elected. Liverpool-born peer Lord Rennard was appointed as the charity’s new chair.

Parked outside the church in a beaten-up Audi as the meeting played out: Anthony McGann Jr and his friend, celebrity debt collector Shaun Smith (Smith once starred in an unbelievably successful Vice documentary entitled: The UK’s Scariest Debt Collector, spawning various TV appearances and book deals). 

Under its previous leadership Smith was employed by the Eldonian Community Trust for ‘consultancy services’ at £1,500 a week. His contract said he was responsible for things like ‘signing documents’ and ‘media strategy’. Smith had earlier crossed The Post’s radar thanks to a visit he paid to the house of an investigative journalist in November 2023. In that house call, he’d been accompanied by now-imprisoned two-time former world champion bare knuckle boxer Luke Atkin. Atkin filmed Smith as he pointed to a picture of a rat in the journalist’s window. “This is a guy who caused controversy at the Eldonian,” Smith says in the video which was later posted on Instagram. “Well he doesn’t seem to be in — we’ll have to call back”. Whether this visit fell under his ‘media strategy’ remit remains unclear — Smith won’t answer my emails.

Anyway, if those who had wrestled back control of the charity thought the saga with McGann Jr and co was finished, they had another think coming. With his friends no longer running the Trust, McGann Jr filed a petition to have the charity wound up altogether. 

Its bank accounts, containing a measly £42, were frozen, as he argued that the charity owed him £18,755 for legal and accountancy fees. A large portion of these legal fees just so happened to be the money he had spent enlisting Mishcon de Reya to try to prevent The Post and the BBC’s first stories from being published. 

McGann Jr’s argument was simple: this money had been spent on the charity’s behalf, not on his, and with the permission of its then-trustees. One thing complicating his argument was the fact the trustees in question (Sterritt, Jack McGann and so on) had already been ruled to have not been validly appointed. Sterritt says he is unable to comment on this matter due to “active and ongoing legal proceedings”.

In the meantime, Shaun Smith — who claimed in an email to The Post earlier this year that he had “no involvement or interest in anything to do with any matters relating to the Eldonians” — was also in touch with the new trustees. Smith was in debt collector mode: he was owed £25,500 for those ‘consultancy services’, he said, and was prepared to sue. The dual legal action was, in the words of one trustee, “a kill switch…if the charity died, everything went with it — including any chance of getting our land back.” If the charity went bankrupt there would be no entity left to pursue the restitution of the land.

The Post also learned that weeks before the March AGM, McGann Jr’s sister Lisa Clarke transferred 999 of the 1000 shares owned by Eldonian Leisure Ltd, a subsidiary company of the Eldonian Community Trust charity, to her brother and a Warrington man called Jamie Peters, recently convicted for his role in a £13.6m fraud operation conning prospective models, masterminded by former Brookside star Phillip Foster. As of today, Peters owns all 999 of those shares, meaning he controls the leasehold of the Village Hall — one of the key sites of the village. 

A bogus invoice

I was laid low by the flu on the day of the court case. I turned up to Manchester’s Civil Justice Centre halfway through, and sat sweating and spluttering at the back to see whether McGann’s petition would succeed.

This petition relied mostly on proving that the Trust owed him £18,775. Key to his evidence was an invoice, addressed to the Eldonian Community Trust, bearing the letterhead of Mishcon de Reya. In an email to The Post, he told us a senior Mishcon partner “provided clear evidence” that the charity was their client and that all invoices were paid by him on the charity’s behalf. If McGann Jr had been able to prove in court he was due that money, it would have been the end of the Trust, the charity tasked with running the village his own father had built from scratch decades prior.

Something seemed off about one of the documents he had submitted, though. Ahead of the case, the charity contacted Mishcon de Reya for a copy of the invoice, providing only the invoice number. What came back was unexpected: an invoice with the same amount, same date, same address — but, crucially, no reference to the charity at all. Somehow or other, reference to the charity had appeared on McGann Jr’s invoice. The Charity Commission then contacted Mishcon directly. The reply was unequivocal: the firm had never issued the invoice McGann Jr submitted to Court in evidence. At the end of the hearing, McGann Jr’s case was dismissed by the judge.

McGann Jr says he cannot respond to our point about the validity of the document as legal proceedings are ongoing — he intends to appeal. We can’t speculate on whether he faked the document — there may well be some more innocent explanation. What we can say is that for whatever reason the invoice he submitted was bogus.

What comes next is anyone’s guess. The new trustees of the charity are still fighting Smith’s claim for £25,500, have no money in the bank and are now attempting to find out whether there is any legal path to reclaim the land currently owned by foreign-registered companies. 

Nonetheless, the victory in court is a very significant step forward. Brian Jones, who I first met in Liverpool’s Church Street McDonalds four years ago, as he attempted to explain the bizarre Eldonians tale, is now a charity trustee. “We’re a community built on grit, not gold,” he tells me. “When we were pushed to the edge — even ignored by our own. The people paid to speak for us vanished into smoke, and the ones who owed us nothing at all stepped into the fire.” 

In his phone call to me on the night before the publication of this story Anthony McGann Jr recognised that me and him started off on a bad foot. “You came at me vulgarly,” he says, before noting that he is able to withstand a lot. “I used to have experience in the fight game mate — I can take it”. After all, he's been up against a lot these past few years. “We’re always fighting against politics, the fucking stupid Labour Party and all that…it’s the legacy of my Dad. So we always have that suspicion,” he tells me, trailing off, seemingly implying that I could be some kind of Labour Party agent. Then he adds, with accuracy: “It’s a mad world”.