Moving Assets
Hardman and his team are part of a wave of professional asset hunters whom banks and investors are calling upon as billions of dollars disappear into the largely unregulated offshore economy. Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee in the Madoff case, has filed more than 1,000 lawsuits in the U.S. and Europe to claw back money from clients who escaped the fraud before it collapsed.
Picard and his law firm, BakerHostetler LLP, had racked up more than $800 million in fees and recovered $9.5 billion as of Jan. 9, according to court records and the trustee’s website.
Since 2011, Irish Bank Resolution Corp., a state-owned entity comprising Ireland’s two biggest failed lenders, Anglo Irish Bank Corp. and Irish Nationwide Building Society, have been locked in litigation with one-time billionaire Sean Quinn.
Dozens of lawyers and investigators have scoured shell companies in Ireland, Russia and Ukraine for evidence that Quinn and his family are hiding his wealth instead of paying back his Anglo Irish debt of 2.8 billion euros ($3.8 billion). Quinn, who filed for bankruptcy in 2011, served nine weeks in jail in 2012 after an Irish judge found he’d violated a court order by moving his assets.
Under Surveillance
No case better demonstrates the stakes of asset hunting today than the legal war between BTA Bank and its former chairman, says Antonio Suarez-Martinez, an asset-recovery litigator at London-based Edwards Wildman Palmer UK LLP. Hardman and his team must prove that Ablyazov is the true owner of shell companies the bank says are holding its assets.
The BTA team has placed him and his family under surveillance. It has also used asset-freezing orders, receiverships and lawsuits -- the bank filed 11 separate actions against him in the High Court of London -- to force Ablyazov to return the bank’s money.
“They are fighting very hard and using the full breadth of the law to get those assets,” Suarez-Martinez says of BTA’s hunters.
Obscure Unit