What happened: The High Court found property intermediary One Touch Solution liable for mis-selling care home units to 28 investors across multiple countries.
Who's involved: One Touch Solution (in liquidation), Hiscox Insurance Company, the collapsed Carlauren Group What's at stake: £2,814,195.20 in investor losses, with a Hiscox PI policy coverage trial to follow
Why it matters: The upcoming trial will test whether a PI policy exclusion for "investment advice" applies when the insured crossed the advisory line
Where it stands: Liability decided; coverage and quantum trial against Hiscox pending
One Touch Solution called itself "your partner in prosperity." It promised investors it had done its due diligence on care home developments across England. It said the investments were safe.
Not one of the care homes they sold units in ever opened.
A High Court judgment handed down on October 9 found One Touch liable for mis-selling care home units to 28 investors from countries including the UK, South Africa, Israel, Nigeria, Namibia and Canada. Between them, they lost £2,814,195.20 in the collapsed Carlauren Group scheme. The ruling sets the stage for what could be a significant coverage fight: whether Hiscox Insurance Company, which provided One Touch's professional indemnity policy, must pay out - or whether a policy exclusion for "investment advice" or "financial advice" lets it off the hook.
Between September 2017 and March 2019, One Touch marketed off-plan rooms in luxury care homes being developed by The Care Home Group Limited, also known as the Carlauren Group. Investors paid between roughly £70,000 and £110,000 per unit, drawn by a pitch of 10% guaranteed annual returns for 10 years, plus buyback options at 110% after five years or 125% after ten.
The investors were teachers, engineers, a geoscientist, a retired cattle farmer, a retired IT professional. Many used retirement savings or inheritance money. One couple put in their joint life savings of £91,000. A 75-year-old retiree in Israel invested the proceeds from selling property. A family sold their Canadian cattle farm and put in everything.
One Touch's defence was simple: it was just a marketing agent for the developer. It owed the investors nothing.
The court disagreed. The judgment found that One Touch had held itself out to investors as a specialist "property investment company" providing tailored recommendations - not a mere sales agent. It described investors as "clients," assigned each a personal "investment consultant," and repeatedly told them it had carried out "due diligence" on the developments for their "safety and protection."
One Touch's own website said it checked developer track records through Companies House, visited sites, and instructed solicitors to review contracts "to establish if there is anything in the fine print that could be to our clients' detriment." That language did the heavy lifting in the court's analysis.
One of the most striking passages in the judgment concerns what happened to One Touch's records. After proceedings were issued, the company's managing director deleted the email inboxes of three employees and failed to renew the software licence that held the emails of a fourth - the senior consultant who had dealt with 17 of the 28 investors.
The court found these actions were "in clear breach" of disclosure obligations and said they undermined the credibility of the explanation given for the missing records.
One Touch had also failed to disclose its own website - despite describing itself as an "online estate agent" - until a court order forced production just six weeks before trial. The material came from Wayback Machine captures. When it finally surfaced, the website's content directly contradicted One Touch's pleaded defence. One page described the company as providing "property investment advice" to individuals. Another stated: "Here at One Touch, we put our clients and their interests first."
By mid-2019, every Carlauren care home development had failed. Across the group's entire 22-property scheme, only one site - Latimer Lodge, which One Touch did not sell units in - had ever become operational. The Carlauren Group entered administration, and its controller accepted a 10-year director disqualification in May 2022. The Serious Fraud Office is conducting an ongoing investigation into an alleged £76 million fraud involving the group, with raids and arrests carried out in 2024.
The court found that One Touch continued pushing sales to investors even after mid-2018, when it knew the company responsible for paying investor returns had already defaulted on payments and that serious complaints had been raised about the scheme.
The judgment found that One Touch owed both a duty of care in contract and under general law to the investors. It breached that duty by failing to tell them about critical risks - including that a single company, Accordiant, was on the hook for paying guaranteed returns across all 22 developments without any documented funding arrangements in place. The court found that One Touch's sales staff regularly got the basic structure of the investment wrong when asked about payment and risk.
Nearly all of the claims succeeded. A Swiss family company's claim failed for lack of evidence. One couple's separate claim relating to a different developer, Aronex, also failed. Two other claims were barred because those investors had previously accepted binding decisions from The Property Ombudsman on the same underlying facts.
Hiscox is joined as the second defendant under the Third Parties (Rights Against Insurers) Act 2010 - the law that lets claimants go directly after an insurer when the insured company is insolvent. Hiscox funded One Touch's defence under a reservation of rights.
The next trial will determine whether the PI policy responds. The central question: does an exclusion clause for the provision of "investment advice" or "financial advice" apply? The liability judgment made clear it was not intended to support either side's position on that clause.
For PI underwriters and claims teams, that exclusion question is the one to watch. The court has found, across hundreds of pages of evidence, that One Touch crossed the line from sales agent to adviser. Whether the policy was written to contemplate that crossing - or to exclude it - is now squarely before the court.
One Touch entered creditors' voluntary liquidation in March 2024. The Carlauren Group remains the subject of an ongoing SFO investigation.
