A WEDDING planning company that left dozens of couples thousands of euro out of pocket when it went bust has told its clients to ‘move on’ and not to ‘keep chasing this like it was a crime.’
The Irish Daily Mail revealed last week that gardaí and Interpol are investigating after Weddings In Tenerife left 48 couples high and dry for an estimated €350,000.
Multiple Irish couples have been affected, with one bride-to-be – Sorcha McManigan – telling this newspaper her dream wedding was in tatters after she was taken for €26,000.
The 31-year-old civil servant from Dublin, and her fiancé, Alan Kent, were to get married in the Canary Islands in September.
The British woman behind the firm, Claire Lopez, announced it had become insolvent last month, and all her social media accounts have since been deleted, as well as her official website.
Now her husband, Lars Jensen, has taken to a local podcast in Tenerife to tell those affected: ‘Find a way to move on.’
He insisted that he and Ms Lopez had not run off ‘with a big bag of gold’, but had also ‘lost big-time’ themselves.
The Denmark native said: ‘If they don’t believe that we did everything we could to avoid it there’s nothing I can do about that, but I really hope that they will find a way to move on because if they keep chasing this like it’s a crime, and we need Interpol involved and they need to be investigated and stuff like that, they’re wasting their own time, because this is insolvency.’
He said angry couples should not be trying to use Ms Lopez as a ‘punchbag’, and that she was now spending all her time crying.
Mr Jensen confirmed yesterday that 48 weddings were due to be planned through the company between now and 2028.
Among those clients was Ms McManigan, who told the Mail last week: ‘My heart just dropped and I had to break the news to Alan because he didn’t get the email. The fact, after all the money we had spent, she wouldn’t even ring us to tell us in person...
‘We’ve been in touch with four or five other Irish couples who she took money from. There are a lot of English couples too, some of whom are over in Tenerife right now, and we still don’t actually know the extent of how many people this happened to.
‘Some couples we know who have lost money didn’t even get one [an email] at all and only found out through Facebook. There are people we’ve been in touch with, with weddings in two and three weeks, and they have absolutely nothing organised.’
She added: ‘We found out only on Monday that we have our venue secured for the date that she says, but she only paid €1,000 of the €5,000 venue cost and nothing to any of the other vendors. We are trying to rebuild, but it’s very difficult to find the cost of €30,000-plus in four months.’
She said 80 guests invited to her wedding had booked flights and paid for accommodation, which left her less than four months to arrange a wedding they do not know how they will afford.
She said she was ‘devastated’ after hearing Mr Jensen’s interview. ‘They have completely left us in the dark and the only information we find out is from a podcast,’ she told The Irish Times.
Mr Jensen told the podcast: ‘What simply happened is that the company ran out of money.
‘When you do a lot of weddings, there are bottleneck situations, and it has been a bottleneck situation here over the summer when the money flow simply didn’t stretch.’
He added: ‘If we had continued for another couple of months we would probably have been back on track but we didn’t have any money left to pay, and had to declare insolvency.
‘It’s very important for me to emphasise that it’s not like we just popped up yesterday and promised people weddings. Claire Lopez has 15 years of history as a wedding planner and celebrant in Tenerife.
‘She has been working very hard, and she had also built up a very good reputation among a lot of people. She has performed an extreme amount of weddings _– we are talking six, seven, eight hundred weddings.
So it is not like she was an imposter saying, “Hey, I’m going to give you a wedding” and then suddenly she’s gone. That’s not what happened.’
He told The Tenerife Pod that they started to realise they had a ‘big problem’ two weeks before they filed for insolvency last month.
He said he and his wife had tried to find outside investors to loan them money or to take a part share of the business.
Mr Jensen added: ‘But unfortunately a lot of these people who said that they were interested were not able to produce the money… They were just not able to untie the money that fast, and that is why this situation occurred. I know I cannot say this without people getting upset, but the fact is that we have also lost big-time in this.
‘We have lost our company. Claire has lost her reputation, her career.’
He said Ms Lopez ‘did not need to be a punching bag for a lot of angry people’.
Shouting at her would not achieve anything other than ‘pulling her down further than she already is’, he said. ‘I am very sorry if it doesn’t come through with enough sincerity, but we are truly very, very sorry about this,’ he continued.
‘And they don’t want to hear this either, but Claire has being doing nothing but crying.’
He said people had all the information they needed to publicly ‘denounce’ himself or Ms Lopez, or to contact them, and they were not hiding or using fake names.
He said: ‘If the police want to speak to Claire, they will just pick up the phone and call her.’
Mr Jensen said the company had emailed every affected couple – ‘I think 48 weddings between now and 2028’.
He said there was ‘no point me having face-to-face conversations with angry clients, because nothing will come from that’.
There would now be a line of creditors claiming any money on the company’s books, he said.
Most of the couples with weddings booked for 2027 and 2028 would only have paid a €2,000 deposit to the company, he said, while some have paid nothing.
‘This is not a million-dollar scam, you know,’ he said.
Asked about a couple who said they had paid €6,000 just days before receiving an email telling them about the insolvency – as they flew home – he said: ‘They were not even on the island. That whole claim is very dramatic but they were in the UK at this time.’
Mr Jensen acknowledged that there were ‘extreme amounts of money’ rolling through the company to pay vendors, but that ‘this all happened very quickly – we didn’t see this one coming’.
He said around €85,000 had been paid back over the last week and there was €300,000 ‘out there’ due to be returned.
He said the company would also have €150,000 worth of assets that would be sold.
Ms McManigan said she does not know of anyone who has received a cent back at the time of writing, adding that she also found it distressing to hear nothing from the company, only to see its co-owner appear on a podcast.
She told the Mail yesterday: ‘We don’t know anyone that has received a refund.
‘I don’t know who he’s talking about. We also haven’t received any solicitor information or anything to confirm that they have filed for insolvency. ‘It’s just been so hard.’
Mr Jensen said he had lived a colourful life, and had been in prison, but added that after his release ten years ago he had written a book about gangs in Denmark, before working as an undertaker for ten years prior to moving to Tenerife.