I love these "streetwire" storeis tht Stockwatch puts out a few times a week. There a pile of crooks out there.
B.C. Securities Commission - Street Wire
SEC, feds target Cons. Fortress ex-president Andrews
B.C. Securities Commission *BCSC
Shares issued 0 Jan 1 1900 close $.000
Tuesday Nov 13 2001 Street Wire
by Brent Mudry
While Vancouver broker Trevor Koenig of Union Securities has been the star Howe Street target of American authorities in the past three months, London-based penny stock promoter Graham Andrews, Colorado broker Eugene Geiger and Spanish-based Dutch financier Alfred Peeper have emerged in starring roles in the past month.
The trio are named as defendants in the United States Securities Exchange Commission's prosecution of Absolutefuture.com, while Mr. Andrews is also named in a related criminal complaint of the OTC Bulletin Board promotion, one of Mr. Koenig's rig jobs.
Mr. Andrews quietly stepped down as president of Consolidated Fortress Resources Inc., a Canadian Venture Exchange promotion on Oct. 26, more than three weeks after he was named in an Oct. 1 sealed criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of New York. The Absolutefuture.com complaint was unsealed by Oct. 3, when the other criminal defendant, New York penny stock promoter Roger DeTrano, was arrested.
Michael Graye was arrested the next day, Oct. 4, in a separate SDNY criminal complaint with Mr. DeTrano, who allegedly conspired to help the controversial Vancouver accountant rig his embryonic Vinex Wines promotion. Mr. Andrews, Mr. DeTrano, Mr. Graye and Mr. Koenig, arrested crossing the border on the Labour Day weekend, were all snared in co-ordinated stings featuring the same dirty promoter-turned-informant. (By coincidence, Mr. Graye and Mr. Andrews both have dual citizenships in the exotic offshore enclave of Monaco.)
The SEC troubles of Mr. Andrews came as a surprise to the folks at Cons. Fortress, according to company lawyer James Harris of Watson Goepel Maledy. "We all know him to be a person of great integrity. We are all quite shocked," Mr. Harris told Stockwatch on Tuesday. "Our understanding is that he has to spend his full time fighting that full situation to protect his reputation."
Lawyer Mr. Harris confirms Mr. Andrews faxed his resignation in late October, and there have been a number of E-mails back and forth since then, with company officials offering their support to their hastily departed president. Neither Mr. Harris nor rookie replacement president Ali Alibhai were aware of the criminal prosecution of Mr. Andrews until informed by Stockwatch.
"We really know nothing about the Absolutefuture situation," says Mr. Harris. The corporate counsel explains that Mr. Andrews is an "oil guy," and Cons. Fortress is no longer an oil and gas promotion.
Mr. Andrews had been a senior director of Cons. Fortress and its predecessor, Fortress Resources Inc., since April, 1997, and served stints as its president since about 1999. The controversial financier acquired a 27-per-cent stake in Fortress in 1997 by buying the company's 750,000 escrow shares.
In recent years, Mr. Andrews has been a familiar face in deals on Howe Street, the centre of dealings for the former Vancouver Stock Exchange, which was dubbed Scam Capital of the World by satirist Joe Queenan in Forbes magazine a decade ago. Mr. Andrews has served directorship stints with a number of penny stock companies listed on the Canadian Venture Exchange, its predecessor the Vancouver and Alberta stock exchanges, and the Montreal Exchange.
The British businessman had a rather odd career trajectory, slipping into the penny stock world after achieving some success in more distinguished quarters. According to regulatory filings, Mr. Andrews graduated with a first-class honours degree in mathematics at Oxford University and a PhD in mathematics from a university in Edinburgh. After that, the mathematician moved on to senior corporate finance positions with such blue-chip firms as British Petroleum, Chase Investment Bank, NatWest Bank and W I Carr, which is part of the Banque Indosuez Group.
Mr. Andrews then took his upper-crust credentials to the penny stock hotbed of Howe Street, where he apparently kicked off with a one-year stint in 1992-93 as a director of Robert G. Hunter's ADI Technologies Inc., starting soon after ADI's debut on the VSE and leaving just before secretive Swiss financier and purported money launderer Carlo Civelli's Clarion Finanz AG emerged as a major shareholder.
After getting his feet wet on Howe Street, Mr. Andrews popped up a few years later, in 1995-96, as a director of Robert Atkinson's Dimitra Developments Corp., renamed Jeda Petroleum Ltd. In 1999, Mr. Andrews also joined the boards of another Canadian penny stock promotion, Vantex Oil, Gas & Minerals Ltd., which moved from the Montreal Exchange to the CDNX on Oct. 1, and he recently served as chairman of York Energy Ltd., which is listed on the OFEX Trading Facility in London.
Until Mr. Andrews's troubles with U.S. authorities came to light, Cons. Fortress's most notable directors were Richard Bullock, who replaced Sydney Belzberg as president of the VSE shell in April, 1995, and headed the company until passing the reigns to Mr. Andrews in about 1999, and his son Craig Bullock.
The father-and-son Bullocks resigned as Cons. Fortress directors in June, 2000, coincidentally two months after some unflattering coverage by The Vancouver Sun. Reporter David Baines revealed that Keith King, a former Nevis stockbroker wanted on fraud and forgery charges in South Africa and kicked out of the Isle of Man, had set up shop in Vancouver and had apparently hired Craig Bullock.
The sole officer of Mr. King's Vancouver-based FN Services (Canada) Ltd., an apparent derivation from the fugitive's Nevis-based First Nevisian Stockbrokers Ltd., was the junior Bullock. The Sun noted that father Richard Bullock, although not accused of any wrongdoing, was a close associate of Gary Stanhiser of California, the former Seventh Day Adventist minister who fleeced his flock through an illegal offshore private placement on Howe Street and was banned from the B.C. stock market for life by the British Columbia Securities Commission.
This March, Stockwatch and The Sun reported that Richard Bullock was dubbed a shill for controversial offshore consultant Jerome Schneider in a detailed unsealed Internal Revenue Service affidavit. The document, supporting a search warrant raid on the Vancouver offices of Mr. Schneider, referred to Mr. Bullock as a key associate of Mr. Schneider, fronting for the consultant's Premier Corporate Services Ltd. and Premier Management Services Ltd.
"On paper, it will show that Bullock owns the majority of the shares of stock of these companies while Schneider owns a minority share. The corporations are set up this way so that it appears that Schneider doesn't own or control them," stated IRS Special Agent Harold Durrette in a 44-page affidavit, sworn before United States Magistrate Judge Carla Woehrle in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
(Jack Blum, who kicked off the Schneider investigation in January, 1997, told Stockwatch at an international money-laundering conference in Vancouver in the fall of 2000 that Mr. Schneider had reportedly last been seen in Mexico City. Mr. Blum, an offshore finance and money laundering expert, is best known as a key investigator for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International probe.)
Prior to shilling and fronting for Mr. Schneider's Vancouver operations, Mr. Bullock had the misfortune of appearing in various controversial B.C. cases in recent years. The BCSC sought records from a Vancouver law firm on now-defunct Vancouver brokerage Vantage Securities, regarding an alleged March, 1998, asset diversion from Vantage, allegedly involving fraudster Mr. Stanhiser.
Mr. Bullock has also served stints as a director of various companies listed on the former VSE, and he stepped in as a director of Ultra Pure Water Systems (Canada) Inc. in May, 1995. This was two months after the former Alberta Stock Exchange halted trading in shares of the controversial promotion of Gordon Brent Pierce and referred the case to the RCMP for a 13-month criminal investigation.
Mr. Bullock was not a target in the criminal or regulatory probes of Ultra Pure, or any other probes.
In the serendipity of Howe Street, offshore connections and mysteries are often intertwined.
The star client of Union Securities broker Trevor Koenig, in the Absolutefuture.com rig job, which featured Cons. Fortress's Mr. Andrews, the New York Mafia-linked promotion of WAMEX Holdings Inc. and related bulletin-board rig jobs was career fraudster Edward Durante, whose record of run-ins with U.S. authorities dates back 26 years. Mr. Durante funnelled most of his Union proceeds through a money laundering account at Bank of Montreal's main Vancouver branch, held by Itex Corp. fraud mastermind Terry Neal's Exchange Bank & Trust.
Mr. Neal founded EBT in Nevis and nearby Nauru in the wake of the Itex fraud, and he purportedly relocated to Nevis himself for a while. Nauru was also the prime offshore domicile used by Mr. Schneider, who was fronted by Mr. Bullock, another former president of Cons. Fortress.
Although Mr. Schneider and Mr. Neal both ostensibly operated through sham banks in Nauru and allegedly recruited potential clients in Vancouver, their operations appear to be independent.
(c) Copyright 2001 Canjex Publishing Ltd. canada-stockwatch.com
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