Meet Your Conference Hosts

Dear Professional,

 

My name is David Marchant, founder and editor of OffshoreAlert. At OffshoreAlert, it is our mission to educate individuals and businesses about offshore financial centers and serious financial crime as part of their overall risk management procedures.

 

To accomplish this end, we rely on research, informed sources, investigative tools, analysis and financial know-how. Our conference reflects this attention to detail and brings those procedures, techniques and network of contacts into a public forum.

 

For ten years, OffshoreAlert has stood alone as an exposer of serious financial crime in offshore financial centers – while it is in progress. During that time, OffshoreAlert's relentless pursuit of securities fraudsters, investment scammers, money launderers and other white-collar criminals has made it an internationally-known and respected source for due diligence information, Know Your Customer research and risk management.

 

So successful is it at detecting and exposing financial crime that, from 2003 to 2006, 11 officers from three fraudulent business groups which had all brought failed libel actions against OffshoreAlert's publisher were charged with money laundering and/or fraud in the United States and the United Kingdom.

 

Collectively, they are believed to have defrauded more than $600 million from over 5,000 individuals living in dozens of countries.

 

They were:

 

• Marc Harris: This Panama-based offshore provider was exposed as a money launderer and fraudster in the March 31, 1998 edition of OffshoreAlert. On May 21, 2004, Harris was sentenced to 17 years in prison, fined $20 million and ordered to pay restitution of $6.5 million after a jury found him guilty six months previously of 16 counts of money laundering and tax evasion at the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
• Lincoln Fraser, Nicholas Fraser, Jared Brook, Bill Godley, and Robert Raven: Their onshore/offshore Imperial Consolidated Group was exposed by OffshoreAlert starting on January 29, 1999 until it collapsed in the summer of 2002 with more than $345 million of liabilities and negligible assets. These five former officers were subsequently charged with fraud by the Serious Fraud Office, in the United Kingdom, and their trial is scheduled to take place in 2008.
• Gilbert Ziegler, a.k.a. Van Brink; Douglas Ferguson, Robert Skirving, Larry Barnabe and Rita Regale: Their First International Bank of Grenada scam was exposed in the January, 1999 edition of OffshoreAlert and in subsequent editions. Two years later, the bank collapsed with more than $200 million of liabilities and negligible assets. Criminal indictments against these five former officers and/or promoters on more than 140 counts of fraud and money laundering were unsealed at the U. S. District Court for the District of Oregon in January, 2004. Ziegler died awaiting trial and the other four defendants received prison terms after pleading guilty to money laundering.

 

The cost of due diligence is a bargain compared with the risk you take without it. In fact, most of the financial crimes exposed by OffshoreAlert over the 10 years that we have been publishing could have been avoided if the injured party had carried out (or commissioned) proper due diligence.

 

This year’s Conference continues to make due diligence understandable, and practical, for every Conference participant so that you can walk away with tactics to limit your liability under banking and general legislation and mitigate your risk of being sued, indicted, arrested or defrauded.

 

If you are involved in international finance as a provider of products & services, investor, client, regulator, or law enforcer, the only honest answer is that you can’t.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

 

 

David Marchant
OffshoreAlert founder and publisher