Silverstream Technologies: The Company It Keeps - The Cummins Accountability Project

“Nice try pal”

Award-winning clean-tech on the outside. Fraud-tainted optics at the top. And, in the weeds, an employee who ran a failed small-claims farce over a “write-off” that later passed an MOT. Not a corporate scandal. Just a revealing little window.

Silverstream Technologies wants to be seen as one of Britain’s serious green success stories.

London-headquartered. Maritime clean-tech. Big clients. Big claims. Friction reduction, fuel savings, emissions cuts, awards, handshakes, brochures, the whole decarbonised cabaret. On paper, it is exactly the sort of company you are meant to nod along with before you’ve even checked the wiring.

And to be clear, on the public record, Silverstream Technologies itself does not appear to be sitting on a mainstream corporate scandal. No obvious regulator kicking its door in. No public environmental prosecution. No customer revolt. No spectacular public product humiliation.

Fine.

This is not an article pretending otherwise.

This is an article about optics, judgment, and the sort of company a business appears willing to keep.

Clean-Tech Halo, Dirty Edges

The polished version of Silverstream is easy enough to find. A clever maritime efficiency play. Air lubrication. Reduced hull friction. Lower fuel burn. Lower emissions. Awards. Trade press love. All very proper.

The less polished version starts when you look at the people around the logo.

Because the trouble with halo industries is that they assume the halo spreads. Clean tech. Clean image. Clean conscience. Clean company. Except that is not how life works. A good product does not launder bad optics. Engineering does not disinfect judgment.

Noah Silberschmidt And The Optics Problem At The Top

Let’s start with the obvious stain.

Silverstream founder and chief executive Noah Silberschmidt is tied, publicly, to Silberschmidt v Richards [2025] EWHC 2841 (Fam), a High Court family case in which findings of fraudulent non-disclosure and conscious concealment survived appeal. Delay arguments got nowhere. The appeal failed. That is the public record.

Now, no one honest should overstate that. It is not a finding that Silverstream Technologies as a company committed fraud. The company was not the respondent. The case was personal, not corporate.

But only a fool pretends that makes it irrelevant.

When the founder and face of a business is publicly associated with findings like that, it becomes part of the business’s atmosphere whether the investor relations deck likes it or not. Not because it proves product fraud. Not because it proves corporate misconduct. Because it says something ugly about the judgment and candour at the top of the orbit.

That is not nothing. It is not a footnote. It is an optics problem in a business that trades on credibility.

Then There’s Jago Livingstone

And here the optics get grubby in a different way.

Silverstream employee Jago Livingstone took me to small-claims court over a private-sale Nissan 350Z and pushed a story that the car was, in substance, a write-off. That it would not pass an MOT. That I “must have known” hidden defects existed. That the whole thing was some species of concealed disaster.

He lost.

The claim was dismissed. No misrepresentation proved. Caveat emptor did what caveat emptor is supposed to do when a grown adult buys an older car with disclosed advisories and then tries to retrofit clairvoyance onto the seller months later.

And now, because reality has a cruel sense of humour, the same car he pushed as a write-off has gone on to pass an MOT.

That is not just embarrassing. It is destructive. The sort of simple, factual humiliation that no amount of clever wording can really rescue.

The “Write-Off” That Passed

This is the bit that matters.

Not because an MOT pass means the car was perfect. That is not the argument.

It matters because the claimant’s whole dramatic framing depended on turning an older car with disclosed advisories into some quasi-fraudulent death trap. That framing was useful to him because it inflated the moral tone of the claim. It let him posture. It made him look less like a buyer with hindsight and more like a man uncovering a hidden wrong.

Except he lost.

And the car passed.

So the simplest version is still the best one:

He called it a write-off. He took me to court over it. He lost. The car later passed an MOT.

There is only so much dignity left after that.

What Sort Of People Does Silverstream Keep Around?

That is the only question worth asking here.

Again, this is not “Silverstream is guilty of X”.
It is:

your founder has ugly public legal optics involving fraud findings in personal proceedings
one of your people ran a failed, inflated claim that collapsed in court
the “write-off” at the centre of it then passed an MOT

That is not a corporate scandal. It is worse in a subtler way. It is the kind of thing that makes people stop taking the polished corporate image at face value.

Because if a company wants applause for seriousness, trust and high-end engineering, then the company it keeps starts to matter.

A Business Is Not Just Its Product

This is the bit PR people hate.

A company is not just:

its product
its awards
its customer logos
its growth story
its net-zero self-portrait

It is also:

the judgment of its founder
the conduct of its employees
the standards it appears comfortable living beside

Silverstream may have a genuinely good maritime technology. Fine. Good for them.

But a good product does not prevent the surrounding human material from smelling off.

Verdict

Silverstream Technologies may still have a clean official record.

But it also has:

a founder publicly associated with a failed appeal after findings of fraudulent non-disclosure
an employee who ran and lost a rotten little claim over a supposed write-off that later passed an MOT
a corporate halo that does not quite cover the muck at the edges

That is not enough to call the company crooked.

It is enough to say this:

for a business so keen to look modern, efficient and trustworthy, Silverstream is carrying some very grubby optics.

Not a scandal.
Just a company worth looking at longer than it would probably like.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project and Jago Livingstone victim