Update on Crown Forex
Hi folks,
I have some news on the Crown Forex fiasco, and regrettably it's not good. This information is not yet verified, but at least one major newspaper is saying Crown has "no assets". Since our accounts were never segregated by the broker as they claimed, they are legally deemed "Crown assets", meaning there may well be nothing left to be returned to us.
2 charged with running $190M Ponzi scheme | StarTribune.com
Francesc’s Weblog » Major Investor of Crown Forex S.A a U.S. Scammer and its CEO a liar… What’s next?
As sad as this news is, I at least have some
small comfort in understanding (finally!) what went suddenly so wrong with a company that had been so good to our clients and so reliable for so long. It seems that in December of 2008 two men by the names of Trevor Cook and Patrick Kiley bought a 51% stake in Crown. These men, it turns out, were running a $190 million Ponzi scheme since 2006, and needed a broker to clear their transactions through so it would look to their clients like they were actually trading their money (instead of spending it on 7 luxury cars, a hotel and a casino in Panama, a historical mansion in Minneapolis, several financial firms in Switzerland and the British Virgin Islands, and even a submarine). FINMA's investigation was hampered it seems (though I still
completely disapprove of how they kept us all in the dark for the past 13 months), by the fact that Cook and Kiley had claimed that
Crown was prohibiting withdrawals and that's why they couldn't pay back clients, when in fact it was the other way around!
So... what will become of our funds (IF anything is left)? The liquidators appointed by FINMA keep saying that any info will be posted at
CROWN FOREX SA when it becomes available.
Wish I had better news for you,
-=Andrei