Rani Jarkas

In 2010, OffshoreAlert revealed that Lebanese-American Rani Jarkas, a securities broker with a long history of complaints for dishonesty from regulators, customers and former employees in the U.S., had moved his operations from California to the Cayman Islands, leaving behind substantial unpaid corporate and personal debts. In one case, a 70-year-old client who alleged fraud and elder abuse had been awarded $512,000 by an NASD arbitration panel in 2007. When OffshoreAlert began investigating Jarkas’ new Cayman firm, Cedrus Investments, one of its directors, local attorney Michael Alberga, provided OffshoreAlert with what he claimed was a copy of the company’s register of members, certifying its purported authenticity via his signature and the corporate stamp of his law firm, Thorp Alberga. We confirmed that the document was fraudulent when we exercised our legal right to view the original at Alberga’s office and noticed the original included Rani Jarkas while the ‘copy’ did not. It was obvious that Alberga had provided us with a fraudulent document. Four years after we exposed Jarkas, he was banned from the U.S. securities industry by FINRA.