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Cayman Court Secrecy: A Huge Red Flag for Foreign Investors & Clients

August 8, 2018
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.

Victims of Fraud: OffshoreAlert wants to hear from you

May 12, 2017
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 Tim Schools back in business as a ‘crisis coach’

January 17, 2017
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,

To supporters in Bermuda of Nicholas Genevieve-Tweed …

January 7, 2017
... 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.

Deck the cells with bowls of porridge

December 14, 2016
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

Investment Schemes + Conflicts of Interest = Loss of Capital

November 8, 2016
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

UK’s Operation Rico turned out to be Operation PR

October 30, 2016
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

‘Reporters Without Borders’ – You can’t be serious!

April 21, 2016
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

‘The Panama Papers’: My Initial Take

April 6, 2016
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

We’re Back

April 2, 2016
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

Notice to OffshoreAlert Subscribers and Followers

March 26, 2016
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

Bermuda Monetary Authority: Regulator or Promotional Agency?

November 10, 2015
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?'.

Nicolaas Faure & Drake Fund Advisors – An embarrassment to the BVI

September 15, 2015
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,

Cayman Gov’t in ‘Third World’ attack on local newspaper

June 8, 2015
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

FIFA Indictments Vindicate OffshoreAlert’s 2010 Conference

June 3, 2015
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.

Buttonwood Fraud Victims: Time to kick out the clowns

June 22, 2014
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

Axiom case exposes dysfunctional English court system

February 10, 2014
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

How to Identify Red Flags in Investment Schemes

September 23, 2013
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

Cayman’s Michael Alberga problem: What’s it going to do about him?

July 22, 2013
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

Is Cayman Judge Angus Foster About To Do The Unthinkable?

February 8, 2013
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

Axiom Fund: Investors making one mistake after another

December 17, 2012
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

Axiom Legal Financing Fund: The Lunacy Continues

November 20, 2012
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

Axiom Legal Financing Fund: Time for investors to take control

November 15, 2012
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

A message to investors of Axiom Legal Financing Fund

November 6, 2012
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 web-site back up after Hurricane Sandy

October 30, 2012
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.

McKeeva Bush Corruption Investigation: Time for US to step in

April 2, 2012
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

Another British twit extradited to the USA

February 26, 2012
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.

Prosecution of Wegelin & Co. is good for the offshore world

February 4, 2012
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.

Cayman’s McKeeva Bush Problem

November 25, 2011
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?

Hey, Bahamas: Where’s the justice for Hywel Jones?

September 18, 2011
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

All Offshore, All The Time

August 13, 2011
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