The brouhaha over the liquidation of the fugitive stock trader, Ryan Bateman's shell companies, B & C Capital, ltd., and Bateman & Company, increased this week, with the disclosure that the liquidators stated to the press that they had located, and frozen, assets of the debtor corporations, in the millions of dollars. Conveniently, they have neglected to detail where the missing assets were found, and who is holding them. They are certainly not acting to protect the public.
There are an estimated sixty creditors of the Bateman companies, which illegally received millions of investor dollars, which were stolen from Dundee Merchant Bank's accounts at the Bank of Butterfield, by Dundee President Derek Buntain, and Senior Vice President, Sharon Lexa Lamb. both of these cashiered bank officers are missing; Buntain fled Grand Cayman last year, and Lamb permanently departed more recently. All these individuals, who are mainly elderly Canadian pensioners, have claims upon any assets assembled by the B & C liquidators. It is vital that sufficient information be disclosed, so that these victims can prove up their claims. Were these assets located in Grand Cayman, or overseas, and if so, where are the foreign court proceedings filed, that were used to garner these assets ?
A claim, filed by an anonymous British Virgin Islands corporation, claiming millions of dollars has not been returned by B & C, may very well have been filed by the notorious Cayman Gang of Four themselves, or be a bogus claim. We cannot tell, because BVI companies use bearer shares, and do not disclose the named of their beneficial owners in public records.
If the court-appointed liquidators continue to be non-transparent, its is feared that the Court will close out the liquidation later this month, without giving the victims of the Gang of Four an opportunity to establish a valid claim, upon the assets reportedly acquired in the liquidation. The totally opaque method, through which liquidation proceedings are conducted in the Cayman Islands, serves neither the investing public, nor the ends of justice. It is one of the principal reasons why any objective assessment of Country Risk on the Cayman Islands must conclude that an elevated level of risk exists, for investors who are seeking a safe haven for their wealth, in offshore financial centers.
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