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As any fule kno, the biggest enemy of fraud, corruption, money laundering, and other forms of financial crime is transparency, while their best friend is secrecy. That's why the unprecedented mass sealing of cases that's taking place at the Financial Services Division of the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands is repugnant to anyone with a genuine concern for financial crime.

For a few years now, I've been flabbergasted by articles published by South African financial news service Moneyweb about Belvedere Management Group, which OffshoreAlert exposed as a global criminal financial enterprise in 2015.Since OffshoreAlert's exposé, Moneyweb has gone out of

OffshoreAlert wants to hear from victims of high value fraud who are seeking litigation funding so they can try to recover assets from those who swindled them and their enablers.The reason At The OffshoreAlert Europe Conference in London on

Serial fraudster Timothy Schools, who swindled hundreds of investors out of more than £100 million via his Cayman Islands domiciled Axiom Legal Financing Fund, is back in business … as a "crisis coach" At his newly created www.thecrisiscoach.co.uk,

... you should want to know (but probably don't) that Genevieve Tweed was sued in New York in 2005 (click to download for free), for allegedly defrauding an elderly lady out of a high value property while she was dying.

After OffshoreAlert recorded salesman Simon Nock lying in an attempt to sell a fraudulent investment product on September 22nd, it would have been reasonable to expect his employer, British firm I P S Invest Limited, to fire him, especially after

No year would be complete without OffshoreAlert being sued. In 2016, it happened twice.Both complaints reminded me why the USA is hands down the best place for an investigative journalist to operate.The Federal Communications Decency Act fully protects website operators

One of the quickest ways of detecting whether an investment opportunity is legitimate is to skip to the 'conflicts of interest' page of an offering memorandum. If it's not blank, don't invest.Conflicts are a clear sign that a scheme exists

I long ago realized the United Kingdom is spectacularly ineffective in holding financial criminals accountable for their actions due to a mixture of incompetence, laziness, corruption, lack of resources, a poor judicial system, and a general fondness for non violent

The France based 'Reporters Without Borders' has just released its '2016 World Press Freedom Index', which purports to measure the "level of freedom of information in 180 countries", and, not for the fist time with this annual index, I question

First off the fact that a person living in one of the world's major countries has an account in an offshore jurisdiction is not, in and of itself, evidence of illegal activity. An accuser needs corroborating evidence before making

After ten days offline due to catastrophic damage to our primary and back up servers, OffshoreAlert is back online and operating normally. The cause of the incident is under investigation.Given that we don't store credit card details or payment information

Our site went down in the early hours of Tuesday, March 15th (EST).Please bear with me. Our website will be back up and running early next week. I guarantee it.It was initially unclear whether the problem was caused by a

A few years ago, the then head of enforcement for the Bermuda Monetary Authority was rendered apoplectic on stage at an OffshoreAlert Conference after being asked to name a single individual or legal entity that the financial services regulator had ever penalized or disciplined since it was established in 1969. It's difficult to come up with names off the top of your head when they number so few. Financial regulators in the United States penalize more financial miscreants in a typical afternoon than the BMA has in its entire 46-year history. For promotional purposes, the BMA's message is 'We have one of the three biggest insurance markets in the world. Yes indeed, sniff, sniff, we're the world's risk capital'. For regulatory purposes, the message seems to be 'Insurance market? What insurance market?'.

The measure of any person or business is not whether they become involved in controversy but the actions they take when such controversy occurs.Within hours of OffshoreAlert exposing Belvedere Management Group as a "massive criminal financial enterprise" on March 17th,

When you are one of the principal perpetrators of an investment fraud totaling £98 million, of which at least £11 million was apparently diverted for your benefit, it's best to keep a low profile until the heat dies down and

It's not often that you get to hear conmen in action. Today you do. Click HERE to listen to a telephone interview that I conducted on July 2nd with Sam Zumbe and Jean Philippe Grange, who have been trying to

Bermuda prides itself on being one of the most advanced, best run offshore jurisdictions in the world. In many respects, that boast is deserved.However, in one key area, Bermuda is so far behind the times, it's embarrassing, with the jurisdiction

As someone who was thrown out of Bermuda in 1996 for no reason other than being an investigative journalist, I'm well aware of how sensitive small countries are to criticism.  Their economies are fragile and you're expected to be part

Allegations of fraud, bribery & money laundering in indictments against 14 individuals associated with soccer's world governing body FIFA unsealed last week would have come as no surprise to attendees of OffshoreAlert's annual conference in Miami Beach … five years ago in 2010.

After my blog last year entitled "A Message to Greg Fairley, Ashley Hurst & Anyone Else Thinking of Threatening Me', I didn't think any lawyer client duo would be stupid enough to repeat the mistake of issuing an idle threat

Investors in the litigation funding criminal enterprise known as Buttonwood Legal Capital, Centaur Litigation and Argentum need to kick out the clowns who are managing the different facets of this hopelessly insolvent group and take control of the situation before

 British defamation law is among the most repulsive pieces of legislation that exists in the civilized world and I have nothing but contempt for attorneys who use it to try to bully responsible journalists into not writing about their clients

British authorities rarely fail to disappoint me by demonstrating how third world their country is whenever I try to obtain information for an investigation into financial wrongdoing. Incompetence, inefficiency, ignorance, unhelpfulness, and painstaking slowness are what I have come to

Bahamas based businessman Lester Turnquest has failed in his attempt to have one of OffshoreAlert's video recordings removed from YouTube. The recording explores allegations that Turnquest stole approximately $20 million from a Canadian offshore client and then, as part of

As this video shows, British fraudster Timothy Schools liked nothing better than to 'play the big man' with the tens of millions of pounds that he swindled from investors in Axiom Legal Financing Fund from 2009 to 2012.

As an investigative reporter, the easiest financial crime for me to detect is a Ponzi scheme. Any investment scheme with a performance chart that is essentially a diagonal line trending upwards with little or no meaningful variation over many months

In an article published today entitled 'Cayman company manager produced sham share register to protect client with huge debts in U.S.', OffshoreAlert tells the sorry tale of Cayman Islands attorney Michael Alberga and his firm's breathtakingly brazen attempts to conceal

Investors in Axiom Legal Financing Fund should be extremely concerned by the note that Cayman Islands judge Angus Foster circulated earlier this week seeking what are essentially 'affidavits of reassurance' from a dubious group that has proposed a ridiculous scheme

Investors in Axiom Legal Financing Fund have until Wednesday to try to block the appointment of KPMG's Kris Beighton and John Milsom as Receivers. Once KPMG is ensconced, it will be extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to have them removed. For

Today's libel complaint by Axiom Legal Financing Fund fraudster Timothy Schools against me and OffshoreAlert at the U.K. High Court is as predictable as it is ineffective. In 2010, U. S. President Barack Obama signed into law The SPEECH Act,

In a letter to investors today, Axiom's directors stated that "We would encourage any party who has evidence as to wrongdoing with respect to the Fund to provide that information to the appropriate authorities." Yet, over three weeks ago, OffshoreAlert

In their most recent letter to investors dated November 14, Axiom Legal Financing Fund's directors stated that an Extraordinary General Meeting will be held in December so that they can "present proposals regarding the continued management of the Fund". In

The bad news is you have been defrauded of your investment in Axiom Legal Financing Fund. The sooner you accept this, the quicker you can start taking steps to recover some of your losses. The good news is that the

OffshoreAlert's web site went down temporarily due to Hurricane Sandy hitting the east coast of the USA, where our web hosting company is based. As you can see, our site is functioning normally again. I apologize for any inconvenience.

The two year corruption investigation by the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service into the jurisdiction's Premier, McKeeva Bush, is turning into the sort of incompetent, expensive fiasco that the Cayman Islands and its mother country, the United Kingdom, are known

The extradition of 65-year-old retired British businessman Christopher Tappin to the USA last Friday sparked off the plethora of nonsense in the British media that seems to rear its parochial head whenever any Brit who wears a suit to work is accused of a financial crime overseas.The story almost always seems to go like this: Honest Brit sent to hell-hole U.S. prison where he/she faces imminent death from prison gangs and, if he/she survives that, will spend the rest of his/her life in prison on baseless charges trumped-up by U. S. prosecutors. News organizations will often shamelessly campaign on behalf of the defendant, ignoring any evidence of guilt, no matter how incriminating.

For the first time in one public forum, the chiefs of the SEC, CFTC and IRS whistleblower offices will discuss Whistleblowing as a tool to fight financial crime at The 10th Annual OffshoreAlert Conference. Sean McKessy (SEC), Vince Martinez (CFTC),

A special screening of the tax documentary 'We're Not Broke' will take place at this year's OffshoreAlert Conference, with producers/directors Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes in attendance.

If the U. S. Government's allegations against Switzerland's oldest private bank, Wegelin & Co., are true, i.e. that the bank actively encouraged and helped U. S. taxpayers conceal their assets from the IRS and, it would be logical to assume, their other creditors and victims, the bank represents the worst of the offshore world and it would be convincing evidence that the bank's managers at the time of the conduct were talentless morons.

The Royal Cayman Islands Police, which has been conducting a corruption investigation into Cayman Premier McKeeva Bush for nearly two years, has a dilemma. Even if there is sufficient evidence to warrant charges - should they be brought?

Nearly two-and-a-half years after the assassination of offshore finance executive Hywel Jones, a British national, in the Bahamas, the person who is widely believed to have ordered the hit - well-connected, former politician Lester Turnquest - has still not been charged. This comes as no surprise to me. Just a

The focus of my first blog is to outline what I'm trying to achieve with the new-look OffshoreAlert. OffshoreAlert has come a long way since it was launched in 1997 as a monthly newsletter that was distributed via Cable & Wireless' unreliable broadcast fax service that I connected to by dial-up modem from m