CBD Asylum Director Sentenced for Covid Loan Fraud

The director who built CBD Asylum into a fixture of Britain’s early CBD shelves has been handed a suspended prison sentence and an eight-year ban from running companies, after using borrowed money meant to keep businesses afloat to help buy a holiday home instead.

Alex Hope, 41, moved the proceeds of two loans through a chain of bank accounts and on to a property in Lanzarote, the Insolvency Service said in confirming his sentencing at Hull Crown Court on July 27, 2026. One of the loans was a £25,000 government-backed Covid Bounce Back Loan; the other was a £56,000 loan taken out by his CBD company.

A brand funded, then hollowed out

Hope was sole director of a management consultancy, A Hope Ltd, when he secured the Bounce Back Loan in August 2020 by declaring a turnover of £100,000. The company’s own accounts showed less than £13,000. He was also a director of Virtutum Limited, which traded as CBD Asylum in Hull, when the business took the £56,000 loan from a private lender in 2021.

Co-director Liam Jones, 42, was convicted of fraud over that second loan. Both men had signed the agreement with personal guarantees that no legal action was being taken against them. In reality, a specialist litigation firm had been chasing the pair for around £800,000 since 2019.

The borrowed money did not go into the business. Hope moved the funds through a series of accounts and abroad, where they formed part of a €245,825 payment for a two-storey, semi-detached house in Puerto Calero, bought in his and his wife’s names.

Hope pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud, one of money laundering, and one of failing to disclose the value of company shares while bankrupt. He received a three-year prison term suspended for three years, the eight-year directorship ban, and 250 hours of unpaid work. Jones was given a 10-month sentence suspended for 18 months, a two-year ban, and 100 hours of unpaid work. Both had been declared bankrupt in March 2022 and pleaded guilty at Hull Crown Court in June 2026.

“Alex Hope deliberately lied about his company’s turnover to secure a Covid loan meant to help businesses survive the pandemic,” said Mark Stephens, chief investigator at the Insolvency Service, who said Hope then laundered the proceeds through a string of accounts to help buy property abroad.

What “on the register” actually means

For anyone who bought CBD Asylum products, the more useful lesson sits one layer down. Virtutum was incorporated in September 2017, during the fast, lightly regulated stretch when Britain’s CBD market was filling shelves faster than regulators could assess what was on them. The pair said they wanted their products to let “the benefits of CBD to be experienced through many different walks of life,” and built a catalogue of CBD isolate oils, drops, capsules and sweets sold as everyday wellness goods.

Dozens of those products still appear on the Food Standards Agency’s public register of CBD novel foods with “validated” status, filed under a single application tied to the US isolate supplier Mile High Labs. To a shopper, “validated” can read like an official seal of approval. It is not. It means only that a product was linked to a novel-food application the agency accepted as complete enough to assess before its cutoff, letting the product stay on sale while that safety review runs — a review that, across much of the UK market, remains unfinished. Anyone stocking or buying CBD is better served checking a product’s own lab testing and labelling, the ground where routine packaging and label compliance often slips, than treating a register entry as a guarantee.

Crucially, the register speaks to paperwork, not to the financial health of the company behind the label. A product can carry validated status while the business selling it is being drained by its own directors and sliding toward bankruptcy. That gap between a brand’s public face and its real footing is exactly what a shelf presence, or a line on a register, cannot show.

What happens next

The Insolvency Service said it is seeking to recover the fraudulently obtained funds under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.

For the wider CBD category, the case is an awkward marker. The sector has leaned on Food Standards Agency register status as shorthand for legitimacy while the agency works through a long backlog of novel-food safety decisions, even as Britain’s regulated cannabis market keeps expanding. CBD Asylum is a reminder of how little that shorthand guarantees about the operator behind the products, and how much a buyer choosing between CBD brands still has to verify for themselves.