Duncan Kreeger is typical of the plucky entrepreneurs that dominate Britain’s property market.
He started out at his father’s mortgage brokerage then co-founded two property lending firms. The 42-year-old candidly states on his website that “around 50 per cent of the businesses he has been involved in have failed”.
“Lending money is the oldest business in history, bar one maybe,” Kreeger said in an interview at his firm TAB’s office in Borehamwood, a commuter-belt town north of London.
Kreeger is a beneficiary of a global financial realignment that has reshaped the British niche of “bridging” lending he plies his trade in: the dizzying growth of US private credit.
Blue Owl Capital, which oversees more than $300bn and has become a lightning rod for concerns around non-bank lending, previously provided a credit line to Kreeger’s firm. TAB last year raised a debt facility of up to £500mn with private debt pioneer AB CarVal.
But several private credit firms that piled into the high-octane world of bridging loans — short-term mortgages provided to borrowers who would otherwise struggle to obtain bank finance — are now licking their wounds after two of the most prominent players in the UK’s over-£10bn sector collapsed.
Supposedly sophisticated firms such as Apollo’s Atlas unit and Castlelake are facing heavy losses on the implosion of Market Financial Solutions, which was — on paper, at least — one of the UK’s largest bridging lenders before it unravelled in February amid fraud allegations.
Banks have also become enmeshed in the scandal, with HSBC on Tuesday unveiling a $400mn hit stemming from funding it provided to Atlas. Barclays, which provided banking services to MFS, disclosed last month a £228mn loss following the group’s collapse.
MFS’s administrators are now preparing a court claim against the group’s founder, Paresh Raja, in a bid to recover the £1.3bn “unaccounted for across the MFS Group”, according to insolvency documents. Raja, currently in Dubai, is subject to a worldwide travel ban and asset freeze. The UK financial regulator has also opened an investigation.
The collapse of MFS came weeks after Blue Owl sparked the administration of Century Capital Partners, another short-term mortgage provider to London’s rich and famous, after discovering irregularities and demanding repayment.
The question for the industry is whether there will be more accidents ahead, given the influx of new capital into specialised property lending.
The twin collapses came months after the back-to-back failures of First Brands Group and Tricolor Holdings in the US, reigniting fears of lax underwriting standards in asset-backed lending — or of more “cockroaches” lurking, as JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon put it.
Nick Parkhouse, head of financial services at the restructuring firm Interpath, said the UK bridging market’s expansion “has gone hand in hand with the massive growth of private capital”, with many firms now operating in a “much more institutional” manner.
However, he cautioned that “there is a lot of liquidity, an unregulated product and broker-driven origination that can lead to unhealthy competition”.
Bridging loans generally carry double-digit interest rates and a term of one to two years, often falling outside post-crisis mortgage regulation. Many providers do not have a banking licence and are narrowly overseen by the Financial Conduct Authority for compliance with money-laundering rules, compared with traditional lenders who are supervised by the Bank of England and FCA.
The product is pitched as a stopgap, often for businesspeople who need to buy property more quickly than it would take for a mainstream bank to approve a loan. It can also be used by asset-rich but cash-poor individuals.
The godfather of the industry is northern entrepreneur Henry Moser, a former car salesman who founded the Blemain group in 1974 and wrote his first bridging loan just over a decade later.
Despite a regulatory fine in 2012 levied on Moser and one of his businesses for failing to treat customers fairly and other failings, his group, now called Together, has become one of the most institutional providers of alternative mortgages outside the UK banking system.
The family-owned group has recorded a profit every year since its founding, last year booking £202mn of profit before tax, according to results shared with investors in a £300mn bond Together raised last month.
The 76-year-old’s group is considered the largest bridging firm in the country, with these short-term mortgages comprising £1.8bn of its £8.1bn loan book at the end of 2025.
While Together frequently raises public asset-backed securities — in March it borrowed over £500mn in this way — its bridging loans are mostly funded through banking lines.
More upstart firms have found US credit funds to be willing lenders, however. These funds have even taken equity stakes in UK bridging lenders.
Distressed debt firm Avenue Capital’s funds hold a majority stake in bridging loan specialist Glenhawk, for example. The New York hedge fund also held £98mn of riskier “mezzanine” debt at one MFS vehicle that administrators now predict will be wiped out. Avenue declined to comment.
Restructuring professionals overseeing MFS’s insolvency and the nearly 100 companies that made up its wider group have uncovered suspected fraud that ranges from collateral improperly pledged to “multiple” lenders to “all the income” in lenders’ collections accounts having been “diverted” away.
Raja’s lawyers told the FT that he “categorically denies any and all allegations of fraud or dishonesty and is confident this matter will be sensibly resolved in due course”.
Kreeger expressed bafflement at how MFS was allegedly able to double-pledge collateral, noting that TAB’s lenders and auditors had full access to his group’s technology platform.
TAB’s most recent holding company accounts show it booked a £5mn loss in 2024, primarily due to a “small number of large non-performing loans”.
Kreeger said that these financial statements spoke to TAB’s transparency, as its lending is contained in one consolidated group with a single auditor, in contrast to the patchwork of audit firms MFS used across myriad silos.
Johan Groothaert, chief executive of property lending firm Fiduciam, compared MFS to a “pre-crisis black box securitisation”, due to its opacity, “inadequate equity” and complex interlinkages between funding vehicles.
Opacity may be a wider problem.
Groothaert added that the “loan tape” that many bridging firms provide to lenders to give an overview of their mortgage book does not disclose ultimate owners of properties, nor identities of firms providing the property valuations.
“You also can’t see from the loan tape what the quality and the upkeep of the property are like, all elements that affect liquidity, and hence recovery potential in case of an enforcement,” he said.
Muddying the picture further, some larger bridging firms have also provided financing to smaller groups.
Public filings show that Twinwin, a vehicle linked to MFS that has also gone into insolvency, provided funding for mortgages originated by other firms.
MFS already faced challenges enforcing on mortgages it wrote before its collapse, particularly on controversial loans to Bangladesh’s former land minister Saifuzzaman Chowdhury and his wife.
Administrators for the couple’s insolvent property companies have described MFS’s documentation as “a mess” and blighted with issues, such as “multiple inconsistent versions of the same legal charge”.
While MFS drew scrutiny for providing these mortgages after Chowdhury was later accused of corruption, the former politician and his family also received loans from other firms, including Century Capital, TAB and Kreeger’s former business, West One, now owned by US hedge fund Elliott Management.
Kreeger said TAB carried out “enhanced due diligence” before lending to Chowdhury in 2020 and 2021 — loans that he later repaid.
“As a bridging lender, you get all sorts of weird and wacky inquiries, it’s probably not something we would do now,” Kreeger said, before adding that lending to Chowdhury did not seem “particularly wacky at the time”, as he had a “big portfolio in the UK with mortgages all over town”.
Century Capital’s collapse, meanwhile, has done little to curtail the ambitions of its founder, Paul Munford, who has recently tried to raise capital for a new bridging lender called Century London.
In a pitch deck, Munford wrote his new firm aimed to become a “trusted partner of equity-rich but cash-constrained individuals”.
Munford founded Century Capital in 2011, after a brief stint helming a lender established with property mogul brothers Christian and Nick Candy. Century concentrated on lending against prime real estate to super-rich clients who may nonetheless have faced issues tapping mainstream banks.
Century’s previous high-profile borrowers, according to filings, included a company belonging to Sir David Barclay’s son Aidan, which took out a loan in 2023 that was then repaid, and former beauty queen Pauline Chai, who won a £64mn divorce settlement in 2017.
A representative for Chai confirmed that the loan had been repaid ahead of its maturity date. Aidan Barclay, who recently agreed a deal with lenders to avoid personal bankruptcy, did not respond to a request for comment.
Munford’s lieutenant, Luke Navin, stepped down as Century’s managing director in October, months before it collapsed. He told the FT that he “resigned due to fundamental disagreements over the management of the business”. Munford declined to comment.
Despite its collapse, Century’s secured lenders, such as Blue Owl and NatWest, expect to receive a full recovery through its administration.
Century’s owners also raised more than £10mn from a family office through an offshore vehicle, according to people familiar with the matter. They added that this vehicle occasionally provided funding against mortgages that means it ranks as a creditor behind Blue Owl.
Kreeger’s TAB has also raised money from private investors and family offices, which he said accounts for about half of the group’s nearly £260mn loan book.
MFS, too, drew funding from Raja’s network of wealthy contacts, who are now facing huge losses. That could rattle high-net-worth investors that have funded other bridging firms.
One sector specialist predicted that the cadre of “old school” individual investors who traditionally funded the industry could prove less flighty than the US credit funds, however.
“Obviously, institutional money is going to be totally freaked out,” he said, arguing that many lenders that rely on private credit firms will not be able to renew their financing lines.
“I think you’ll see a lot of bridging lenders suddenly disappearing from the market.”
Additional reporting by Cynthia O’Murchu in London