WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--According to an amended complaint filed against Amicorp, the trust services company participated with other trust companies, individuals, and an international bank to facilitate a massive real estate Ponzi scheme that led to huge losses to trust beneficiaries.
An amended complaint filed on June 12 in Miami-Dade County alleges that Amicorp, an international trust services company, actively participated in a multi-million-dollar real estate fraud which victimized many Latin American families. Amicorp which is a firm that has offices in Brickell and New York City as well as Latin America, the Caribbean, India, New Zealand, and Hong Kong, markets itself as providing “a broad range of services to mostly corporate, but also high-net-worth clients around the world”, as stated in the company’s corporate webpage. The complaint alleges that another trust company, SGG, and a Swiss bank, Pictet & Cie, were also involved in the scheme.
In March of this year, Amicorp was also reported to be involved in the PNB fraud case in which Nirav Modi used dummy firms to divert loan proceeds to Amicorp Barbados and other entities and was also been involved in the 2017 Odebrecht Scandal for supposedly assisting in payment of illegal commissions for contracts in Ecuador and other Latin American countries.
Regarding the Miami-Dade case, the complaint alleges a massive fraud orchestrated by investment adviser Fernando Haberer and by real estate developers Roberto Cortes, Juan Carlos Cortes, Ernesto Weisson and companies they controlled. According to the complaint they held themselves out as raising funds to develop a real estate project in South Florida, but the project was never done and they instead diverted the financing to keep the Ponzi scheme going, for their own purposes.
The complaint alleges that Amicorp played a key role in the fraud, aiding in the looting of investor accounts that held trust assets for which Amicorp was a trustee. The documents state that Amicorp presumptively, SGG and Pictet & Cie each participated in this massive scheme by helping to set up and operate the trust entities that facilitated the fraudulent note sales, by creating obvious conflicts of interests, and by helping to perpetuate the scheme while knowing that innocent investors were being defrauded.