Miami

The following statement was released today by OffshoreAlert, through its editor, David Marchant, founder and owner of KYC News, Inc., located in Miami, FL, in response to questions about our future in-person conferences...

Even boxing promoters would be envious of the hype surrounding blockchain technology. Blockchain will revolutionize the way business is conducted, end corruption in elections, let you know where the food you ate came from, and, generally, re-shape the world order. Or so the marketing goes. Virtually all offshore jurisdictions are attempting to become the go-to jurisdiction for FinTech start-ups and some, like Bermuda, have gone all-in. In this session, we will tell you why almost everything you read about blockchain is wrong and explain what the technology can potentially be used for and what it can't.

Our panel will discuss how to go about obtaining litigation funding, the criteria that must be met, the types of claims that litigation funders are interested in, and how litigation funding is structured.

Boiler rooms are international fraud schemes that operate with near impunity while defrauding investors around the world of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. In this presentation, experts in both federal law enforcement and private investigations will share their unique perspectives on combating the issue. In the first part of the session, a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agent will discuss how federal agents locate, gather evidence, and prosecute overseas boiler rooms, as well as share examples of successful cases. The Agent will also discuss how the modern day investigation requires a strong working relationship with the private banking industry as well as cooperation between multiple foreign governmental entities. In the second part of the session, a private investigator and internationally recognized expert in the field of boiler rooms will discuss how the Philippines and other parts of SE Asia are hotbeds of criminality, places where expatriate investment fraudsters operate boiler rooms as they set about swindling foreigners living in the world's major countries, many of whom are pensioners. In addition, the investigator will discuss who is responsible, pay-offs to police, judges, and others in authority, assaults, murders, and other related issues. The investigator will also show you how to use alternative methods to recover assets, thereby avoiding long and costly litigation in jurisdictions with poor judicial systems.

London-based financier Bill Browder has positioned himself as an anti-corruption crusader who will stop at nothing to avenge the death of his former tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Russian prison in 2009. Browder claims Magnitsky was tortured and murdered by corrupt Russian prison guards because he blew the whistle on a $230 million tax fraud committed against the state using companies that were stolen from Browder. He has been the driving force behind new laws in the USA and other countries that are aimed at Russians and others who are involved in corrupt activity. Critics of Browder, however, have accused him of being a fantasist, pointing out what they claim are inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his Magnitsky story, his tax fraud conviction in Russia, and his pre-Magnitsky history of business dealings they claim are questionable. In this session, we will attempt to determine fact vs. fiction.

This session will look at how different jurisdictions are regulating or seeking to regulate cryptocurrencies, including Initial Coin Offerings, and analyze legal rulings so far in this fledgling industry.

Obtaining a judgment in a British Commonwealth jurisdiction, whether in the United Kingdom or one of its offshore territories, is no easy feat. The sad truth is that wining the case might have been the easy part. Enforcing a judgment when there are few or no assets in the jurisdiction issuing the writ can involve complex cross-border litigation. Execution of a judgment is even more difficult when assets, or individuals subject to the judgment, are in the United States, where a web of federal and fifty different state laws can stymie even the most tenacious judgment-holder. This session will explore the process and methods to enforce foreign judgments in the U.S., and impart practical tips to do so quickly and efficiently. It will also show how U.S.-based agencies can reach offshore activity.

This session will look at emerging key issues and latest developments affecting the litigation funding industry.

If the western media is to be believed, Russia is an out-of-control country that poses a realistic threat to global stability, whether by the poisoning of dissidents, computer hacking, corruption on a grand scale or other means. This session will go beyond the hype and propaganda and seek to determine fact vs. fiction.

Several years after major US criminal and regulatory agencies adopted whistleblower rewards programs, this session will analyze how they are performing and how much money has been paid out. It will include looking at the increasing number of rewards applications being submitted on behalf of offshore whistleblowers.

Leading international fraud and value recovery attorneys will take your questions and discuss emerging and dominant issues that impact your ability to be successful and effective. This session is intended to be informal and interactive and represents an opportunity for you to have your questions answered by experts who have 'been there, seen it, done it'.

Leading international fraud and value recovery attorneys will take your questions and discuss emerging and dominant issues that impact your ability to be successful and effective. This session is intended to be informal and interactive and represents

In this session, whistleblowers' attorney Steve Kohn will discuss how his client, Howard Wilkinson, blew the whistle on his former employer, Denmark-based Danske Bank, which has been implicated in a €200 billion Russian money laundering scandal and is now being criminally investigated in the UK, US, France, and Estonia. Steve will discuss opportunities for whistleblowers to become multi-millionaires by exposing wrongdoing in global financial institutions and other types of companies, both in the United States and overseas.

Before he retired in 2015, Sen. Carl Levin was the scourge of the offshore world, regularly overseeing investigations into financial malfeasance. In this session, Sen. Levin's chief counsel for many of those investigations, Elise Bean, will open the lid on their financial investigations, which ultimately led to ground-breaking legislation such as The PATRIOT Act and FATCA.

This session will look at examples of corruption, theft, judicial abuse, and the detention of foreign businesspeople conducting business in Dubai and other cities in the Arabian Gulf region.

Chief Don Fort, of IRS Criminal Investigation, will tell you why the world is getting smaller for tax criminals. With the formation of the new and innovative Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement last year, the US, UK, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands have found ways to share information, work joint investigations, and move towards criminal proceedings in dozens of cases. Criminals and enablers of tax crimes alike should be on notice that their days are limited.

This session will explore judicial initiatives in the area of cross-border judicial communication and cooperation, a topic that has been thrust into the spotlight due to recent developments in the 'Liberia v. ACE' asset recovery/litigation funding case at federal court in the United States.

This session will look at binary options fraud, which has become a global phenomenon, particularly in Israel, where many of the perpetrators are based.

This session will look at current and future initiatives in the IRS's ongoing efforts to identify and collect taxes from U.S. taxpayers with undeclared offshore accounts and financial arrangements, as well as the efforts undertaken to prosecute and penalize those that assist such taxpayers.

This session will look at an investment fraud perpetrated by a British former bankrupt double-glazing salesman whose group raised more than £400 million from 6,000 mainly British pension investors by selling the dream of properties in St. Vincent & The Grenadines, Barbados and St. Lucia.

This session will look at the causes, including systemic corruption, of Brazil's financial crisis and discuss how the country's situation can be improved.

Learn how to conduct efficient pre-investment due-diligence and how to determine if the debtors and guarantors have assets that can be recovered without incurring more cost than it's worth.

After a thorough review of 15 years of SEC enforcement actions, Professor Urska Velikonja found that the widely-circulated statistics were invalid, and the metrics deeply flawed, with the SEC double and triple counting many of its enforcement actions and overstating fines.

The sale of citizenship has grown into a $2 billion business, with poor island countries cashing in on demand for their passports from abroad. But who are the buyers? Why would they want a second passport, anyway? What actors are behind the growth of the citizenship industry, and how do these middlemen help their clients offshore not just their assets, but themselves?

This session will look at the hunt for offshore assets in some of the most bitter and extraordinary high net worth matrimonial proceedings in recent years, including the 'Sarah Pursglove v. Robert Oesterlund' and 'Michelle Young v. Scot Young' divorces.

This session will look at extraordinary allegations of billion dollar fraud and corruption involving 1Malaysia Development Berhad, which is controlled by the Government of Malaysia and was set up ostensibly to facilitate long-term economic investment for the country through global partnerships and promoting foreign direct investment.

This session will look at the increasing problem of fake news, how it can influence public opinion, and look into why certain people are susceptible to fake news that, to others, is clearly not believable.

Litigation funding has taken off over the last few years, with an increasing number of asset recovery cases funded by third parties who are seeking to make a handsome profit. The industry is not without its risks, however. Some cases have backfired spectacularly for participating law firms and funders, leaving them exposed to substantial damages and other liabilities.

This session will review the massive offshore tax fraud committed by the billionaire Texas business moguls Samuel Wyly and Charles Wyly, and the numerous financial planning errors that caused their collapse, including improperly-used offshore trusts, lack of minimal disclosure, overly complex structures, failed tax strategies and the inability to use current aggressive tax avoidance methods as a substitute.

This session will explore the notion that litigation funding is the only historically transformative and disruptive innovation since contingencies (1700s) and insurance (1800s).

This session will analyze the benefits of adjudicating foreign disputes in the USA and the legal hurdles that must be overcome in order for cases to be accepted.

This session will present evidence that fraud is not an occasional occurrence by rogue employees among Wall Street's major financial institutions and their service providers but is, in fact, a business model. This session will include looking at Wells Fargo's creation of millions of fake accounts to boost revenues.

This session will look at the peculiarities, difficulties and viability of suing sovereign nations, and enforcing judgments, for acts of corruption, terrorism and other misdeeds.

Chapter 15 of the U. S. Bankruptcy Code, which deals with access to U. S. courts in foreign insolvency proceedings, went into effect in 2005, so it's no longer a baby. It's now a tween. This session will explore the most recent Chapter 15 developments and discuss what kind of teenager Chapter 15 might become.

This session will explore ways to recover value for investors when publicly-traded foreign companies that incorporate in the USA "go dark" and stop reporting to securities regulators, something that is a particular problem with firms from China.

This session will deal with how to go about obtaining information in offshore jurisdictions, using criminal, civil and public means.

This session will look at the likely impact on high-value international financial products and services under U.S. President Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress, including financial regulations and laws, such as FATCA; tax avoidance schemes by major global corporations and high net worth individuals, corruption investigations and prosecutions, and offshore finance in general.

This session will look at the impact on offshore finance of The Panama Papers, The Bahamas Leaks and other offshore database breaches.

Supreme Court Justice Ian Winder and two Queens Counsel, Brian Moree and Brian Simms, will discuss how the commercial courts are functioning and areas for improvement.

This session will look at the biggest leak in the history of global finance - 11.5 million records revealing the hitherto hidden offshore financial dealings of over 12 current and former world leaders, including prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, the president of Ukraine and the king of Saudi Arabia; 128 additional politicians and public officials around the world, and others.

Every crook needs a compliant bank. Madoff had JP Morgan ($17.5 billion); Stanford had SG Private Bank (Suisse), HSBC and TD Bank ($5.5 billion); Rothstein had TD Bank ($500 million) ... the list is depressingly long. This session will discuss proven ways to make banks pay up when they have provided services to fraudsters.

This session will explain cutting-edge techniques and legal theories by which to prove fraud and fraudulent transfer, pierce the corporate veil, locate and seize assets, and enforce judgments.

The session will deal with how individuals and financial institutions can operate within the reporting requirements of the new law, stay away from the mandatory withholding requirements and prevent US investigations and prosecutions.

Attend this session to learn how digital forensics, combined with good legal counsel, can lead to great results in civil litigation and other scenarios. Attendees will learn the process that allows material evidence to be gathered and civil litigators to get the truth.

This session will look at how the 'Bloomberg Billionaires Index' is calculated, with an emphasis on the calculation of the net worth of Donald Trump, who is either insolvent or very wealthy, depending on who you ask.

This session will involve a psychoanalysis of Trump and his supporters, an explanation of his popularity, and what it says about the USA.

Experts on the IRS Whistleblower Program will discuss the program's evolution, their own personal experiences in working within the program, what works, what doesn't and what needs to change.

In the wake of the release of 11.5 million hitherto confidential account records known as 'The Panama Papers', which the target, Mossack Fonseca law firm, claims was obtained through hacking, and various other leaks of client information, this session will look at prudent steps to protect your data, whether stored on mobile devices, servers or in other electronic form.

This session will look at the latest developments in the area of e-discovery, including how US-based rules affect other jurisdictions, how to harvest hidden material, data review strategies, and cross-border transfer of data for litigation purposes.