Australian regulators are tracing millions in pension savings held by Trio Capital.
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IT READS like an airport spy novel: an unsolved murder in a Tokyo red-light district, exotic tax havens around the world and thousands of defrauded investors in Britain.
Prada Replica Handbags The connection is an investment firm in the country town of Albury, New South Wales, now centre of an investigation by Australian regulators concerned about the whereabouts of millions of dollars in pension savings.
Albury was the home of Trio Capital, trustee to four pension schemes with about 10,000 members and responsible entity for several managed investment schemes. Total funds under management, $A426 million.
Trio, previously named Astarra Capital, had a close relationship with an outfit called Absolute Alpha, manager of a hedge fund called Astarra Strategic.
By August last year, Absolute Alpha had rebadged itself Astarra Asset Management and had been appointed as investment manager to all of Trio's big funds, responsible for investing money on behalf of Trio.
In a warning sign made famous by Wall St swindler Bernie Madoff, Trio claimed positive returns in almost every month of 2008 and 2009 - a period otherwise known as the global financial meltdown - as everyone else watched their portfolio values collapse.
Authorities were alerted to Trio in September in a letter from John Hempton, a fund manager who runs a blog on the website of his firm Bronte Capital, drawing their attention to the improbably smooth returns achieved by Astarra Strategic.
Other red flags have since become apparent. Absolute Alpha had links with one of Britain's biggest stockbroking scandals, Pacific Continental Securities UK, with estimated losses of up to [PndStlg]300 million.
Sole directors of Absolute Alpha/ Astarra Asset Management since it was established in April 2005, are a Canadian, Shawn Richard, 34, and New Jersey-born Eugene Liu, 33.
They are clean-cut and plausible - and Richard has been a confident media performer. But the extent of their links to the disgraced British broker Pacific Continental Securities has not been fully understood.
Until recently, Liu's online biography showed he worked for PCS. Richard's showed he worked with the firm in Taiwan from 1996 to 2000; but, in October 2007, he dropped all online mention of it.
Well he might: in June that year, PCS UK collapsed with estimated investor losses of [PndStlg]300m from dodgy stocks the broker had flogged. The business was castigated by the Financial Services Authority, which found it had acted without integrity between 2005 and 2007.
Chanel Replica HandbagsAccesspoint, AccuPoll and eSat were among 40 high-risk, "over- the- counter" shares that could not be sold to US investors, but were marketed by PCS to unwary investors in Britain, often using high-pressure selling tactics.
Richard and Liu have more than a passing employment record with PCS UK and its offshore owners. Company filings show multiple links exist to this day. In one link, Astarra Asset Management is wholly owned by a Hong Kong company called Century Investments Holdings. No such company exists on the Hong Kong companies register, but it gives its address as Level 13, Silver Fortune Plaza, 1 Wellington St, Central Hong Kong.
Until late 2008 the address was
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