Grenada Bank Liquidator Reports On Owner's Seedy Habits

Tax-News.com, New York

07 August 2001

Offshore Alert at www.offshorebusiness.com reports that the founder of First International Bank of Grenada appears to have spent much of his time looking at pornography over the Internet while fleecing his clients.

Offshore Alert specialises in uncovering and reporting offshore scams under the motto: 'The pen is mightier than the fraud'.

FIBG is being liquidated by Marcus Wide of PricewaterhouseCoopers, and his second report to creditors contains the results of an analysis of the hard drive taken from Van Brink's laptop, which shows that about 80% of the settings on his browser pointed to porn sites. The report can be downloaded free of charge from Offshore Alert's web-site.

One of the 62 pages of attachments to the 39-page report is a copy of the bogus "assignment" to FIBG of a "carved red ruby" known as "Boy on a Water Buffalo". This was the document, says Offshore Alert, that Grenada's then chief regulator, Michael Creft, accepted as proof of FIBG's initial capital, even though it was fraudulent and not liquid, as required by Grenada's banking law.

Offshore Alert says that Van Brink is currently hiding out in Uganda while police in North America and Marcus Wide investigate the bank's affairs.

"FIBG had no coherent investment strategy," reported Wide. "Amounts were invested or advances made in the context of a disorganized process in what can be described as nothing less than 'highly risky junk ventures'."

The liquidator says that finding out what happened to clients' funds and establishing accurate figures for FIBG's assets and liabilities has been difficult because of the chaos in which FIBG was operated. Many records have disappeared, along with the people who operated the bank.

Wide reported that he had realized $470,403 of assets so far and estimated that "net realizations before professional fees and other administrative costs will range from a high of $7.4 million to a low of $1.7 million". He estimates that $125 million of clients' principal was deposited at FIBG and its many sub-banks, which is down from the estimate of $206 million when the liquidation began.

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