Hi - some of you may know me, others will not; I'm a financial investigator based in Canada and I'm just concluding a written series on a public company called YBM Magnex, before heading off on summer holidays; I see that YBM, which has its own interesting thread here on SI, has come up in some posts about Turbodyne.
If it assists anybody, there is some background history that may be of worth knowing - and possibly warrant follow-up to see what commonality, if any, there may be in past circumstances and today's situation. (For those who don't know my work - I have nothing to do with playing the market, long or short. I think that people should have available as much factual information as possible so that they can carry out their own due diligence and make informed investment decisions.)
I am not going to get involved with any current investigation of Turbodyne - I am otherwise occupied at present. Based upon my research of business in Russia and the former Soviet Union, I would say that things are often not as they appear to be in these countries. Anyone wanting to assess the merits of Turbodyne claims would benefit from carefully scrutinizing the history and bona fides of the "TransBusiness Group of Moscow, Russia" and seek very specific, on-the-record, details from Turbodyne management as to the identity of principals of this group, and any commitments, guarantees, assurance of capacity etc. the company may have with such a group. Putting the details on the record now can ensure that people are more accountable later on in the process.
Perhaps, the most useful observation I can provide at this time is a little historical background of a key principal associated with the company formerly known as Clear View Ventures Inc. (a January 1993 5:1 roll-back of Dundee Resources Corp.). As has been recently noted in The Financial Post, Turbodyne was in the news in Canada in 1994 when its director Nick Masee, a former manager of private banking with The Bank of Montreal, disappeared together with his wife. The Masees were purportedly going to a dinner meeting with an investor at the Trader Vic's restaurant in Vancouver, B.C. on August 10 1994 and have never been seen again.
When I last looked at Turbodyne, its president was Leon Nowek. Nowek was a director and secretary of a fraudulent VSE-listed company, Northfork Ventures Ltd., that was exposed in mid-1992 as a scam after an investor hired the U.S. white collar investigative firm of Kroll Associates to look into the company's affairs. Northfork falsely claimed it would market state-of-the-art endoscopic surgery instruments invented by Dr. Anthony Nobles, who, it was claimed, held university degrees from UCLA (Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, a Doctorate in Biomedical Engineering) and the University of Texas (Bachelor of Science in Physics). As it turned out, Nobles had never attended UCLA, and he'd been a student at the University of Texas but never graduated. Northfork's touted medical products proved to be equally inventive fictions.
When the VSE pulled the trading plug on Northfork stock in June 1992, it marked the beginning of a fascinating sequence of events that included the collapse of a house of cards known as the Pineridge group of companies, lead to the cleanup of a major British pension fund, and helped spur a public (Matkin) inquiry of commission into the VSE. Shares in the bogus Northfork Ventures were held by the Wolverhampton Borough Council Superannuation Fund - a multi-billion dollar fund located in the West Midlands of England. Investigation revealed that a fund manager - who resigned and departed under questioning - had purchased shares for the British pensioners in upwards of fifty dubious, or outright fraudulent, VSE ventures. The pensioners lost millions of dollars on these "investments" but the monetary pipeline was shut-down and the main promoter linked to this scandal, Harry Moll (an associate of Leon Nowek), was, essentially, driven out of Vancouver by the publicity. Moll had been instrumental in setting up the Pineridge group of companies - a collection of public deals that claimed to be involved in everything from making bifocal contact lenses, to growing the world's largest pearl (promised to be larger than a five pin bowling ball and worth over CDN $25 million). Many of the claims made by companies in the Pineridge group were false and misrepresentative. When the scheme collapsed, it was revealed that a current of black and brown money flowing from Germany and Switzerland had facilitated the illusions of the Moll-associated group. Millions of dollars vanished into nominee accounts in Panama and elsewhere.
News articles about the Northfork scam - and Turbodyne's Leon Nowek was a director during the material period from 1990 through 1992 - can be located in archives (1992 - 1994) of The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail, The Birmingham Post, The Wolverhampton Express and Star, The Observer (London), Barron's and other papers. These stories are often interwoven with coverage of the Pineridge affair (which also made news in The Economist and other senior journals). Canada Stockwatch published a series of highly detailed articles that ran on a weekly basis from, at least, July 7 1992 until January 21 1994. This unique Stockwatch series lays out the history of Northfork, another medical products deal that involved the fake "Dr." Nobles, Neuro Navigational Inc., (Nowek was also a director of Neuro), the entire Pineridge affair and its links to money men and crooked players in Germany and Switzerland. The fact that no one has been jailed or censured in connection with the egregious Pineridge swindle helps explain why the VSE earned such a negative reputation in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
In any event, these and other sources of information may be of interest to anyone here looking to understand how Leon Nowek has travelled from Northfork to today. If there are other common elements behind the scenes, the coverage in Canada Stockwatch may prove the most helpful - due to its depth of detail - in outlining avenues of investigation in Europe and beyond.
Good luck all.
Sincerely, Adrian du Plessis
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