Michael Gilbert

A new investment scam that has arisen out of the ashes of the failed Imperial Consolidated Group is being run along virtually identical lines, OffshoreAlert can reveal. Potential investors in a British Virgin Islands-registered firm doing business as 'Property International' are being offered annual interest rates of 18 per cent by Imperial's former management and promoters.

The results of an independent geological survey of 4.5 million acres of land in Argentina to which the Imperial Consolidated Group has mining rights are expected to be known by the end of August. They will go a long way to determining the level of dividend creditors can reasonably expect, said a spokesman for Imperial's UK-based administrator, Mazars Neville Russell.

Imperial Consolidated, whose operations include an offshore bank and offshore mutual funds, has lost a defamation lawsuit that it brought in New Zealand against a former broker. In a judgment in the High Court of New Zealand on December 18, 2001, Judge William Young ruled that defendant David Frederick Stewart was being truthful when he criticized the group on a web-site.

Michael Gilbert, who was severely criticized by a New Zealand judge in a recent court ruling (see separate story), is part of a reorganization that involves the Imperial Consolidated Group and companies with the prefix 'Alpha'.The firm that he is a director of changed its name from Imperial Consolidated (New Zealand) Ltd. to Alpha Equities Asia-Pacific (NZ) Ltd. on November 29, 2001.

OffshoreAlert's investigation into the Imperial Consolidated Group reached high farce in May when the firm gave a number of Pythonesque answers to questions that we submitted to its UK-based Public Relations firm, Luther Pendragon. Perhaps the most comical response was a claim that it was prevented by UK law from disclosing the qualifications and experience of a 25-year-old man listed as General Manager of Grenada-based Imperium Bank.