Belvedere unravelling into a “huge collapsing scam”

Financial services players have a penchant to over-complicate. It’s good for business.  Scamsters possess an obvious incentive to do the same. It’s also good for business. So, unravelling complex structures like the one designed by South Africans Cobus Kellermann and David Cosgrove at Belvedere requires patience – and large pieces of paper.Fortunately, the senior investigator at the Guernsey Financial Services Commission, David Yabsley, has done a lot of the work for us, accumulating over 1 000 pages of evidence that’s summarised in his 28 page affidavit (which the Belvedere duo did not respond to).

Yabsley exposed Belvedere’s modus operandi: Raise money via legitimate Guernsey-registered low risk funds; channel the cash into other companies in Mauritius; and draw that money to invest in high risk “assets” elsewhere, including SA, whose valuations could be easily manipulated.

There are two new pieces today on Biznews outlining this financial deception in all its ugliness. Richard Smith, a UK-based investigative journalist specialising in international investment stings, reckons Belvedere looks like a “huge collapsing scam.” And our follow-up interview with the man who broke the story, OffshoreAlert’s David Marchant who works out of Miami, exposes some new connections,including David Cosgrove’s intimate involvement with the R365m UK scam CWM FX which was recently shut down by the London Police.

Yesterday’s Top Five stories