Insider Talking: December 11, 2007
Bermuda took another step down the road from well-respected, relatively-clean, model democracy to internationally-ridiculed, corruption-ridden, banana republic when the office of Bermuda's Auditor General, Larry Dennis, was raided by police for the second time in five months on November 17, 2007; Two ex-clients of jailed former Panama-based offshore financial services provider Marc Harris escaped prison-time when they were sentenced for tax evasion-related offenses at the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on November 30, 2007; AM Costa Rica news service reported on November 9, 2007 that the Seccion de Fraudes of the Judicial Investigating Organization raided the offices of Trade Exchange SA, a.k.a. Tradex, on October 30 as part of an investigation into the activities of an expatriate financial consultant, Mark Emory Boswell, a.k.a. Rex Freeman, and his wife, Evelyn Reed; Three former employees of National Westminster Bank Plc - popularly known as the 'NatWest Three' - entered into plea agreements with the U. S. Government on November 28, 2007 in which they admitted their roles in defrauding their employer of $7.3 million in March, 2000 via transactions involving Enron Corp. and a legal vehicle in the Cayman Islands known as LJM Cayman LP Ironically, earlier in November, just before much of the British press were lauding the NatWest fraudsters, several British newspapers published the results of research by offshore banking provider NatWest International Personal Banking that indicated 1 in 10 British expatriates have been victims of banking fraud; and The manner of the collapse of Colorado's last remaining offshore bank, American Intercapital Depository and Trust, known as AIDT, which regulators recently closed down due to "hopeless" insolvency and their belief that the management was dishonest, casts doubt on the credibility of The Offshore Institute, a professional organization whose President, E. Jerry James, was AIDT's guiding force.