The
Recruitment
Wrapper
How a Leeds Staffing Company Became a Bitcoin Treasury Vehicle for Retail Pension Money
Connecting Excellence Group PLC is a Leeds executive recruitment company that, on 11 December 2025, raised £3.3 million by selling itself to retail investors as a Bitcoin treasury vehicle. Four and a half months later, the investor-facing analytics dashboard contains five distinct quantitative errors computed from four different stale price snapshots. The corrected diluted mNAV is 2.72x — the dashboard displays 2.53x. Bitcoin must rise 177% before an entering buyer recovers the premium, not 153% as the dashboard implies. Average daily trade value is £7,988, not the £21.30 the dashboard displays. The understatement is 375×.
The Company simultaneously reports a “Bitcoin Yield” of 136% YTD and a total return since admission of negative 24.5%. Both are accurate. They point in opposite directions because the dilution and premium-compression mechanics consume every penny of the notional gain. A retail investor reading “+136% Bitcoin Yield” is looking at a portfolio down a quarter.
The dashboard does not work. No two derived metrics share the same underlying price basis. None of them matches the prices displayed on the same page.
The same security is dual-listed on the OTCQB Venture Market in the US as XCELF. The OTCQB display carries a third, different share count from either AQSE figure; two contradictory average-daily-volume figures on the same page; and no offer to sell at any price at the moment of capture. No two surfaces tell the same story about the same security.
The distribution route: Winterflood Securities approved the Admission Document as a financial promotion under Section 21 FSMA. The retail offer was double-oversubscribed. The shares now sit inside ISA and SIPP wrappers held by ordinary retail investors who cannot exit them at any meaningful size. The CEO openly identifies the regulatory arbitrage: Bitcoin structured products are prohibited from UK retail tax wrappers. XCE is not.
The Company tells regulators one thing.
It tells investors another.
The CEO acknowledged the risks.
Then deleted the acknowledgement.
A CEO making and publicly retracting material risk disclosures, then making a false public statement to explain the retraction, is conduct the FCA’s Senior Manager and Conduct rules contemplate directly.
From the investor presentation.
Set against the Company’s own documents.
On 16 April 2026 CEO Scott Ellam and CFO Angus Gladish hosted a recorded investor presentation. The following findings are each set against the Company’s own contradicting documents. All quotations verbatim from source.
The mNAV Floor Guarantee — “positive MNAV at all time”
CEO Scott Ellam, Investor Presentation 16 April 2026: “the profitable operations hold the MNAV that I referred to earlier as floor so if you imagine an EBITDA multiple in our industry times six is quite common for the PLCs that allows us to be at a positive MNAV at all time allowing capital raised to always be accretive if converted immediately into bitcoin.”
The claim: the operating business creates an EBITDA-multiple floor that mathematically prevents mNAV from going negative. Positive mNAV “at all time.”
The 30% Bitcoin CAGR Projection + “always going to go up”
CEO Scott Ellam, Pt2: “we believe we’ll see a base case of a 30% compound annual growth when you look back over the next 10 years.” Later in the same segment: “I believe the Bitcoin price is always going to go up over the long term and it will certainly, as a base case, always be worth more than it has been in the past.”
A 30% base-case CAGR projected as an absolute in a recorded financial promotion to retail investors holding tax wrapper investments.
The Bond Safety Claim — “those bonds are very safe”
CEO Scott Ellam, Pt1: “Those bonds are very safe and offer upside for the investors, the business and the bond buyers.”
The XCE BTC-denominated convertible bond has an issuer refix option that allows the conversion price to be lowered if the share price falls. The first tranche subscribers include institutional investors and strategic investor Adam Back.
Cartwright Credential Without Conflict — the Chairman’s role presented as bona fides
CEO Scott Ellam, Pt1: “There’s also Sam Roberts our chairman. Sam is director investment consulting at Cartwrights. He led the first British pension fund allocation to bitcoin in recent years.”
Roberts’ Cartwright role is presented as a credential — bitcoin pension expertise, professional standing. What is not disclosed in the same breath: Cartwright is XCE’s paid BTC liquidity provider and Custodian Adviser. Roberts’ director fees and warrants are paid to Cartwright. Cartwright is omitted from the public Advisors page.
Subsidiary Operating Profit — Group EBITDA loss omitted
CEO Scott Ellam, Pt1: “1.2 million group revenue for the period, net fee income up 20 percent to 0.9 million between 1st July and 31st of December and a 0.78 million group gross profit with a 0.34 million operating profit for the flagship operating business Spencer Riley.”
The relevant aggregate for Group shareholders is the Group result. The subsidiary’s operating profit is cited. The Group EBITDA is not.
The dashboard says £21/day.
XCE’s own dashboard. Five errors. 375× gap.
The complete Aquis trade tape — 195 trades across 56 trading days, 2 January to 24 April 2026. The Company’s own analytics dashboard reports average daily trade value of £21.30 and average daily volume of 1,390 shares. Forensic reconciliation against the Aquis trade tape identifies five distinct errors in the dashboard. The worst: the “Average Daily Trade Value” is not a daily average at all — it is the mean size of an individual filtered retail trade (sub-£47), mislabelled as the daily total. Actual active-day average: £7,988. Understatement: 375×. The same methodology appears on the OTCQB Venture Market display (XCELF), which also reports approximately 1,400 average daily volume. Both figures exclude 89.4% of total market volume. The three charts below make the gap, the filter, and the RNS pattern visible. No inferences are drawn beyond what the timestamps support. The pattern warrants scrutiny under MAR Article 8. The inference is for the regulator.
| Time | Price (GBX) | Volume | Value (GBP) | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10:30 | 2.1500 | 33,070 | £711.01 | — |
| 10:34 | 2.0500 | 2,000,000 | £41,000.00 | Matched-pair leg 1 — same minute, same price, same size as leg 2 |
| 10:34 | 2.0500 | 2,000,000 | £41,000.00 | Matched-pair leg 2 — identical in every respect to leg 1 |
| 11:00 | 2.1000 | 50,000 | £1,050.00 | — |
| 11:00 | 2.1000 | 50,000 | £1,050.00 | — |
| 11:37 | 2.0001 | 12,500 | £250.01 | — |
| 11:59 | 2.0000 | 150,000 | £3,000.00 | — |
| 13:48 | 2.0349 | 1,622 | £33.01 | — |
| Time | Price (GBX) | Volume | Value (GBP) | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 08:39 | 1.60 | 10,845 | £173.52 | — |
| 11:12 | 1.525 | 170,378 | £2,598.26 | — |
| 12:58 | 1.89 | 211,272 | £3,993.04 | — |
| 13:04 | 1.8622 | 52,760 | £993.05 | — |
| 16:32 | 1.80 | 350,000 | £6,300.00 | Largest 22 Apr print. At or immediately after formal close. 375× the dashboard avg daily value. |
| Time | Price (GBX) | Volume | Value (GBP) | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 08:37 | 1.99 | 569,285 | £11,328.77 | Largest single GBP-value trade in full dataset. +10.6% from 22 Apr close. |
| 08:53 | 2.00 | 25,000 | £500.00 | — |
| 09:47 | 2.195 | 1,139 | £25.00 | — |
| 09:55 | 2.195 | 22,551 | £494.99 | — |
| 11:40 | 2.1875 | 20,253 | £443.03 | Intraday high: +22.0% from 22 Apr 16:32 reference. |
The complete
40-page report.
70 exhibits. SHA-256 hashed. Five dashboard errors. The CEO admission. The deleted screenshot. The false explanation. The full trade tape with matched-pair analysis.
Report is also distributed directly to Aquis Stock Exchange (market integrity), the Financial Conduct Authority (regulatory action), and institutional allocators evaluating XCE. Press enquiries: contact via paulfaulkner.com/contact/
Three share counts. Two contradictory volumes.
No offer to sell at any price.
What you actually own.
You own a share of a Leeds executive recruitment company called Spencer Riley, wrapped inside a holding company called Connecting Excellence Group PLC, which holds 62.93 Bitcoin as treasury reserves. The recruitment company produced approximately £175,000 of operating profit in the year before listing. The Group, in its first half-year as a listed PLC, reported a £54,000 EBITDA loss.
You do not own Bitcoin. The Company itself confirms this in every Bitcoin-related RNS: “an investment in the Company is not an investment in Bitcoin, either directly or by proxy.” The CEO confirmed it directly in a public comment before deleting it: “BTC per share isn’t a redemption right.” You have no legal claim on the underlying BTC. You have no right to redeem your shares for Bitcoin.
You bought a share that, at the price you paid, is approximately 2.72x the value of the Bitcoin the Company holds — not the 2.53x the Company’s dashboard displays. For Bitcoin to rise far enough to recover that premium, BTC would need to appreciate approximately 177% from your entry price, not 153% as the dashboard implies. The Bitcoin NAV displayed on the dashboard (£4.00M) is overstated by 11% — actual Bitcoin NAV is £3.60M. Both errors work against you and neither is disclosed as an error.
The Company’s own analytics dashboard shows “Average Daily Trade Value: £21.30.” Forensic reconciliation of the full Aquis trade tape shows the actual active-day average is £7,988 — 375 times larger. The dashboard figure is not a daily average. It is the mean size of an individual filtered retail trade (the 38 smallest trades, all under £47) mislabelled as the daily total. Every block trade — 60 trades representing 89.4% of total volume — is excluded from that metric. The retail-accessible market (trades under 10,000 shares) totals £3,779 in value over four months. If you wish to exit a £2,500 position, you represent more than 100 days of total retail-accessible trading. The “exit” your platform’s “sell” button implies does not exist at any meaningful position size.
You are protected by neither the Financial Ombudsman Service nor the Financial Services Compensation Scheme on the Bitcoin component of this investment. You should read the Important Notice block at the foot of every XCE Bitcoin RNS. You should read the Risk Factors section of the Admission Document. You should compare those documents to the analytics page and the 16 April 2026 investor presentation. The two sets of documents tell different stories about the same security.
This report does not constitute investment advice. You may wish to speak to an FCA-authorised financial adviser before making further decisions about this holding.
