CLAIRE Wilkinson and Paula Tatters love Bellside Brae. After all, they paid for it.

The two 70-somethings are visiting the new-build housing scheme in Cleland, North Lanarkshire, for the first time, chatting in the sunshine as they wander past five-bedroom detached homes behind freshly laid lawns and drives full of spotless BMWs.

“I’m really impressed,” Ms Tatters tells Ms Wilkinson. “This is really top-end.” Ms Wilkinson agrees: “It is just as I imagined it would be.”

Ms Tatters, 71, is a businesswoman from Elgin. Ms Wilkinson, 74, is an actor from Sussex. The pair are among more than two dozen small investors who put up some £1.2 million to get the Bellside Brae scheme off the ground. Their money has gone. They want to know where. So do politicians.

Ms Tatters and Ms Wilkinson and their fellow Bellside Brae investors were among hundreds of people to put money through a UK business called Cavendish Moore.

Now closed, this firm hit the headlines back in 2011 after Britain’s financial services watchdog launched a probe into its conduct. Cavendish Moore had placed adverts in the press offering returns of “up to 50 per cent in two years” in land and property investments. “Can you afford to miss out?” its publicity asked.

Cavendish Moore insisted it was different to so-called land bank scams – schemes where investors, often elderly, are enticed to invest in plots which had still to get planning permission. Instead the firm said it specialised in finding investors for land that was ready to be developed. And it grouped together investors into limited liability partnerships or LLPs to carry out individual projects.

The old Financial Services Authority (FSA) thought this amounted to an unlawful collective investment scheme. Its successor body, the Financial Conduct Authority by 2014 did a deal under which Cavendish Moore had to pay some of its investors back just 10 per cent of their money. Some of those who did get cash were already dead.

The firm is now being wound up. Its liquidator, Paul Allen of FRP Advisory, late last month said he had discovered a number of large transactions carried out by Cavendish Moore before it was shut down. In a formal report filed at Companies House, he said: “I have thus far been unable to establish the ultimate beneficiaries and/or the rationale for a number of such transactions.”.

The investors in Bellside Brae were just one group of many who formed an LLP called Cicada under the guidance of Cavendish Moore.

After payments to Cavendish Moore, this firm representing 27 investors in 2009 put £700,000 into a joint venture with a developer called Clydebrae Developments to put up the homes now called Bellside Brae.

Matt Blair, a retired Scottish engineer who now lives in England, was as impressed as Ms Tatters and Ms Wilkinson with the new homes.

He said:”It is slightly better than I expected. The finish is fabulous. They have done a great job. But we have been excluded from benefiting from this project. I think it is inconceivable that you can build quality homes on a site like this and that your money could disappear.

“When you make an investment you know there is risk. You might not get all of your money back, but to lose all of it?”

The problem for Mr Blair and his fellow investors is that Clydebrae Developments went under before the project was finished. The business was struck off in 2015. It had no assets. Clydebrae was owned by another 70-something man, Robert Kirk of Helensburgh. The land it was developing, it turned out, did not belong to Clydebrae, it was held by a business registered in the British Virgin Islands called Crannoch Investments, in trust, according to lawyers for Cicada, for Mr Kirk.

The Herald asked Mr Kirk if he could explain what had happened to the investors’ money. Speaking at his sandstone home in the leafy west end of Helensburgh, Mr Kirk said he could not say. He added: “I’m retired and I have been out of it for seven years. I don’t know what the situation is now. “

Mr Kirk had more to say in a letter last year to a lawyer hired by the investors, most of whom lost £35,000 in the scheme. He said he did not have any interest in the offshore firm Crannoch and that Clydebrae had made no profits and owed the investors nothing.

He said money from the joint venture had gone to complete groundwork at the site.

Bellside Brae, he added, was “unsuccessful for a number of reasons, predominately market related”. Clydebrae was forced to sell its right to develop the land by its secured creditors, he explained.

Rights were bought by another business called Calder Developments. One of its former directors, Mark Thompson, had also served as a director of Clydebrae. The Herald was unable to reach either Calder or Mr Thompson for comment.

Mr Kirk wrote: “I did not benefit financially from [this] transaction. I have lost a significant sum of money. I do not own my home as a result and am living in rented accommodation.”

Ms Wilkinson, who featured in the 1960s soap Compact, is also now renting, a single room. “I thought I was going to get a little flat. That has all been taken away from me. Now I live on benefits.”

Aberdeen North MP Kirsty Blackman said: “I’m concerned that those who invested in Bellside seem to have lost significant amounts of money, and there is almost no ability to seek redress, or even to get information about where their investment has gone.”