Meet Your Conference Hosts

 

Dear Professional,

 

My name is David Marchant, founder and editor of OffshoreAlert.com. At OffshoreAlert it is our mission to educate and protect the public from becoming a victim of serious financial crime.

To accomplish this end, we rely on research, informed sources, investigative tools, analysis and financial know-how to uncover serious financial crime each month. 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, in four months from November, 2003 to February, 2004 alone, 11 officers from three fraudulent business groups which had all brought failed libel actions against OffshoreAlert's publisher were convicted, indicted, or arrested for 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 being found guilty six months earlier of 16 counts of money laundering and tax evasion at the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
• Lincoln Fraser, Jared Brook, David Willerton, Masao Imadzu and one other: 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 arrested in the United Kingdom in February, 2004 on suspicion of fraud and were released on police bail pending further investigations by the U.K. Serious Fraud Office.
• 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.

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.

 

Take a few minutes out of your day and see for yourself the depth and breadth of our program and presenters. After doing so, ask yourself this question: How can I afford not to attend? 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.

 

As you’ll discover in the pages that follow, you can walk away from this Conference with ideas and strategies proven to thwart those who are ruthless in their pursuit of taking for themselves what rightfully belongs to you.

 

Sincerely,

 

David Marchant
OffshoreAlert founder and publisher