BULLETIN: R.J. Zayed, Court-Appointed Receiver In Trevor Cook Ponzi, Recovers More Than $1.1 Million In Switzerland
Trevor Cook
BULLETIN: The court-appointed receiver in the Trevor Cook Ponzi scheme has recovered more than $1.1 million that had been tied up in Switzerland.
Receiver R.J. Zayed says that $1,127,495 has been deposited in a U.S. Court account.
“[T]he Receiver has now accomplished the goal of repatriating the Swiss funds so that money can be returned to investors,” Zayed said in a court filing dated yesterday.
The development is good news to Cook’s swindled investors — but it was not without costs and legal drama.
An individual U.S. investor in the Cook Ponzi scheme filed a criminal complaint in Switzerland to give himself priority to the funds, putting himself ahead of hundreds of other swindled investors and violating a U.S. court order, Zayed said.
Records show that the U.S. investor who filed the claim lost at least $598,921 in the swindle.
A Swiss prosecutor would not release the Cook cash to U.S. investors as a whole while the individual complaint was pending, and Zayed filed a contempt motion in the United States against the individual Cook investor, accusing him of being an impediment to the receivership’s efforts to claim the sum for all defrauded investors.
The Swiss complaint filed by the U.S. investor was withdrawn on May 24, Zayed said.
With the impediment of the U.S. investor’s complaint removed, “the Swiss prosecutor was able to lift the freeze on the Receiver’s UBS account and clear the way for the money to be returned to the United States and the victims of this fraud,” Zayed said.
Zayed said the U.S. investor likely did not have the resources to pay back the receivership estate for the money it expended trying to prevent a single investor from gaining an unfair share of the Swiss proceeds, so the receivership — with the Swiss sum safely returned to the United States for the benefit of all investors — dropped the contempt complaint.
Jason Bo-Allan Beckman helped finance the U.S. investor’s Swiss action in December 2009 — more than a month after Cook’s assets were frozen and investors were prohibited by court order from engaging in self-help to recover stolen funds, according to court filings.
Beckman later emerged as a defendant in an action filed by the SEC that accused him of being a leading figure in the $194 million Ponzi and Forex caper.
