The Stray Ferret has discovered serious concerns about the director of a Harrogate firm that has announced £17.5 million of orders for armoured vehicles destined for Ukraine.

In July, we received a press release about the deal from a reputable local public relations professional.

It was an extraordinary story about a company operating in an unusual sector – so we wanted to know more.

But the deeper we looked into the company and its boss, Richard Matthews, the higher the questions piled up.

Our investigation has raised a string of inconsistencies in Mr Matthews' published backstory – concerns so serious that Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Tom Gordon has written to the Secretary of State for Defence, Wes Streeting, about the matter.

Who is Richard Matthews?

Richard Matthews has given his year of birth to Companies House – the official UK government agency that creates and closes limited companies – as 1974.

But if this year of birth is correct, some of the claims he has made in his LinkedIn profile must be called into question.

Mr Matthews claimed on LinkedIn that he started an apprenticeship with BAE Systems in 1988 – when he would have been 14. The school leaving age in 1988 was 16.

Mr Matthews also claimed on LinkedIn that he was in the British Army “full-time” from May 1989 to September 2003 – in other words, from the age of 15, at a time when the minimum age to enlist in the British Army was 16.

On the website of a company called BroadBridge Wraith – a private security and defence training company based in Norfolk – Mr Matthews was listed in 2008 as managing director, but also as a retired major and “former member of Special Forces for nearly fifteen years”.

This would mean he was in UK Special Forces – which encompasses units such as the SAS and SBS, but not conventional regiments – for the whole time he claimed he was in the army, which is not possible. Soldiers in the British Army must serve a minimum of two years before they are eligible to apply for UK Special Forces selection.

The same website also says Mr Matthews joined BroadBridge Wraith in 2002 – the year before he left the army.

Mr Matthews claimed on LinkedIn that he was doing a variety of City & Guilds courses in subjects including brickwork and blockwork at college in London and Luton from 1990 to 2002 – when he also claimed he was in the army.

He claimed to have completed a master’s degree (MEng) in civil engineering at Brunel University in 1996 – 14 years before he claimed to have started a bachelor’s degree (BTech) in civil engineering in Norwich in 2010.

In 2010, when he claimed he was doing the bachelor’s degree as well as City & Guilds courses in subjects including ‘trowel occupation’ at City College in Norwich, he also claimed to have been working in Los Angeles as a project engineer for a company called YellowRoc.

YellowRoc was a Harrogate-based company with operations in France and the US that specialised in set design and construction for theme parks and attractions – areas where Mr Matthews’ City & Guilds qualifications might genuinely have been useful.

Dissolved companies

In his letter to the Secretary of State for Defence, Tom Gordon MP describes Mr Matthews as "the director of eight dissolved companies".

Between May/June 2022 and July 2023, Mr Matthews was the director of five companies in the Yellowroc group – the theme park set-builder he'd previously worked for – but resigned as director from all of them on July 31, 2023. They were dissolved within six months.

Mr Matthews and the YellowRoc Group Ltd rented a unit at Hookstone Park in Harrogate for a period of 10 years from January 2023, but Jackie Wilson, facilities manager for the landlord, Hornbeam Park Ltd, told us:

Troop Parcels Limited, another of Mr Matthews' companies was incorporated in February 2023 and dissolved 17 months later.

Surprising move

At some point – possibly around the time he was renting space at Hookstone Park – Mr Matthews appears to have made an extraordinary career move, from theme parks to military hardware.

He set up Wraith Defence Technologies Ltd in February 2023. The company changed its name to Kumquat Technologies Ltd in November 2025 and went into liquidation at the instigation of HMRC in June 2026.

But by that time, Mr Matthews had set up 10 other companies whose names began with ‘Wraith’, evidently tailored to different aspects of the group’s activities, such as engineering, track systems, and fabrication.

All these companies dropped the ‘Wraith’ from their name and adopted the prefix ‘W’ instead in June 2026 – just after the liquidation of Kumquat, and the month before Armexis announced its big order for Ukraine.

According to Jonathan French, the company's legal director, Armexis is "the principal public-facing trading brand associated with W Industrial Group Limited".

Lengthy legal response

Our investigation into Armexis began out of simple curiosity about a new company that had won major orders for armoured vehicles – a product this district has no known history of producing.

But along the way, we uncovered inconsistencies in Mr Matthews’ claimed educational and professional background that demand explanations.

So we put our questions to Armexis. Within 24 hours, we received a highly detailed, 14-page legal letter from Mr French.

It only directly addressed one of our questions, about the legal status of Armexis, but failed to provide any answers about Mr Matthews’ background.

The letter stated "Mr Matthews has genuine military and defence-sector experience", but did not provide even the vaguest of details.

Shortly after we sent our questions to Armexis, Mr Matthews’ took down his LinkedIn account, and all the biographies for individual directors – including him – had been removed from Armexis’s website.

But we had anticipated such a move, and saved screenshots of all the relevant pages.

Unanswered questions

What Armexis's legal response did not contain is answers to some very simple questions.

So we continue to ask whether Mr Matthews was, as until recently stated in his LinkedIn profile, in the British Army full-time from May 1989 to September 2003.

Are Companies House records, which list his birth year as 1974, correct?

Did he have an apprenticeship with BAE Systems, and if so, when?

How did Mr Matthews manage the competing demands of serving "full-time" in the army with doing City & Guilds courses in subjects including brickwork and blockwork in London and Luton from 1990 to 2002?

And how did he succeed in studying “trowel occupation” in Norwich at a time when he was also working for YellowRoc in Los Angeles?

Is the man running Armexis genuinely a retired Special Forces major with “nearly twenty years of military and hostile environment security at senior management level”, and if so, why has our scrutiny of his record made him so coy about it, when he has previously been so publicly open?

We have received no reply from Armexis, and our questions remain unanswered.