I think Hopi might have found it.
I always find it amazing how far these fraudsters can get. Years back one of my competitors had a big bond issue (well, big by the standards of my part of industry) and they stuck the proceeds into a Prime Bank Guarantee fund.
PBGs of course do not exist, at least not as funds that are traded and offer huge profits. So they lost all that money and went bust (they staggered on for a couple of years on, would you believe it, the claim they made against the professional indemnity insurance of their own lawyers who had advised them on the deal).
There\’s more amusement about this too: the internal company lawyer of this company was a bloke I\’d been at school with (as with the commenter \”Ambrose\” you see around here sometimes…for clarification, Ambrose was not that lawyer, rather, we were both at school with that lawyer). And yet more: for this one company was part of a much larger small company shares/investment scandal that ended up costing one very senior City company hundreds of millions in compensation. And one of those prosecuted, or at least an attempt was made to prosecute, started wearing ladies\’ dresses (for the avoidance of confusion, he was a he usually) and then on the night before trial attempted an auto-castration.
Those who had been running the company sailed on despite this little hiccup in the smooth running of capitalism. They managed to lose tens of millions more in oil exploration at roughly the same time and are now to be found running several minor companies on the Pink Sheets and even the TSE.X over the water. One sells fishing rods for example: although the main man doesn\’t appear on the books his mistress does.
I\’ll not mention names because, well, because I\’m not really all that sure that that PBG fund ever really existed. I think it\’s rather more likely that there was an insiders\’ pension fund involved.
Which really means that my accusation is that they\’re crooks, rather than as thick as shit.
But I do still find it amazing how far these frauds can go.
Read Vanity Fair, two of the characters carry on a massive fraud (living on nothing) for years.