Belize has been named in a five hundred million US dollar tax fraud scheme. For months, there have been investigations that various companies, including Titan International Securities were using Belize as cover for tax evasion and money laundering. Earlier today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and major U.S. financial news outlets reported indictments of six executives and six companies in the half-a-billion U.S. dollar scam. This was followed by a police operation at the company’s offices. Law enforcement officers descended on the offices of Titan International Securities in Belize City, following a multi-count indictment in a federal court in New York. The indicted executives are U.S. citizen Robert Bandfield, Bahamians Kelvin Leach and Rohn Knowles, Brian De Wit and Cem Can, both Canadians, and fifty-one-year-old Andrew Godfrey, a Belizean citizen. Collectively, they’re all involved in the creation of three brokerage firms in Belize to facilitate the fraudulent manipulation of publicly traded companies in the United States. Those interests, located on Coney Drive, are businesses that have come under intense scrutiny for organizing a half-billion U.S. dollar offshore asset protection, securities fraud and money laundering scheme.
A number of police vehicles were parked outside the multi-storey building, the officers reportedly on the fourth floor executing a warrant. That authorization succeeds an indictment that was announced this morning by U.S. attorney Loretta Lynch, for the Eastern District of New York. Lynch read from the formal accusation against the codefendants, “Bandfield and his co-conspirators devised not only a fraudulent scheme but an elaborate corporate structure based on lies and deceit designed to enable U.S. citizens to evade and circumvent our securities and tax laws. They set up sham companies with figureheads at the helm in an attempt to deceive U.S. law enforcement and regulators and bragged about their scheme to their clients.”
Elsewhere in the indictment, the group allegedly posed as financial professionals and laundered over five hundred million U.S. dollars for corrupt clients, including more than a hundred U.S. citizens and residents between January 2009 and September 2014. The United States’ government’s case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jaquelyn Kasulis, Winston Paes and Brian Morris. As far we can tell it is the biggest tax fraud scheme to be linked to Belizean companies and it is not known what the police were able to uncover when they raided Titan’s offices. Up to news time, another police vehicle had arrived on the scene, presumably to load office equipment and files.
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